Part of the What3Words grid on the Palace of Westminster showing typical words and their pseudorandom distribution
Trade name
what3words
Founded
2013; 11 years ago (2013)
Founders
Chris Sheldrick
Jack Waley-Cohen
Mohan Ganesalingam
Michael Dent
Headquarters
London, England, UK
Operating income
−£46.4M
[1] (2022)
Net income
−£31.5M
[1] (2022)
Number of employees
152[1] (2022)
Website
www.what3words.com
What3words (stylized as what3words) is a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location on the surface of Earth with a resolution of about 3 metres (9.8 ft). It is owned by What3words Limited, based in London, England. The system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words. For example, the front door of 10 Downing Street in London is identified by ///slurs.this.shark.[2]
What3words differs from most location encoding systems in that it uses words rather than strings of numbers or letters, and the pattern of this mapping is not obvious; the algorithm mapping locations to words is copyrighted.[3]
What3words has been subject to a number of criticisms both for its closed source code[4] and the significant risk of ambiguity and confusion in its three word addresses.[5] This has resulted in some to advise against the use of What3words in safety critical applications.[6][7]
The company has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API for bidirectional conversion between What3words addresses and latitude–longitude coordinates.
^ abcCite error: The named reference ch2022report was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Leatherdale, Duncan (15 August 2019). "What3words: The app that can save your life". BBC News. Retrieved 31 January 2021.
^Whittaker, Zack (30 April 2021). "What3Words sent a legal threat to a security researcher for sharing an open-source alternative". TechCrunch. Retrieved 11 November 2021.
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What3words (stylized as what3words) is a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location on the surface of Earth with a resolution of about...
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