The 3 words are because 2 words doesn't give you enough bits of enumerated data. The words aren't to be thought of as X,Y,Z, they're just 3 blobs of bits, where each word represents something like a 0-200,000 range or something.

Huh? Maybe not two short words. But clearly, two numbers can be represented by two words.

How many bits do you think it takes to precisely indicate a location on the surface of the earth?

If you are using 2 angles, I guess the place to start is with the circumference of the earth, which is 40 million meters. So to get within a meter, you then need to encode your angle with enough precision to indicate a single one of the 40 million possibilities.

Ummm. That's what latitude and longitude are. Angles. Or equivalently, radians.

And what's magic about one meter? Latitude and longitude can be arbitrarily precise. But whatever. You want 40 million? Well, 360 degrees / 40 million ~ 10^-5. That's easily handled by "43.63872, -116.24135".

Here's why you'd need three words:

- Circumference of earth = 40,075 km

- Granularity needed = 3 meters

- Number of common words in dictionary (generous) = 60,000

- Number of bits needed for single axis = log((40075 km)/(3 meters))/log(2) = 24 bits

- Number of bits needed for two axis = 48 bits

- Number of bits given by a single word = log(60000)/log(2) = 15.8

- Number of words required for two axis = ceil(48/15.8) = 3

Also, keep in mind, 60,000 words is generous; this many words would probably include lots of archaisms. For comparison, 1password uses 18,000 words in its dictionary. You could probably shave off some bits by getting rid of slices from the north/south poles. You might also save space by ignoring parts of the ocean, but then it starts getting non-trivial.

Yes, it seemed you were arguing those two numbers could easily be encoded using existing words.

If you want to make gibberish word like objects it's probably possible.

But what's the point of that?

If they were always the same two (or three) words, fine.

But if there are multiple such encoding systems, any set of three words (foo.bar.baz) is ambiguous. Because it depends on the system being used.

So sure, someone might remember "foo.bar.baz". But "foo.bar.baz" in W3W might be in SF. But in Hanoi by some other system.

And then we get to the need to pay W3W to generate those codes. That's crazy bullshit.

TBF The maidenhead system (which is a worldwide standard) IS, IMO fairly easy to remember.

And because it's pairs are increasing in area, I can state that I live in IO93 and it narrows it to:

https://www.karhukoti.com/maidenhead-grid-square-locator/?gr...

or I could give the next 2 characters to narrow it to a 1km x 1km (roughly) area that covers my town, or the 2 letters and 2 numbers that give a small area that pinpoints 2-3 houses on my street.

It's not really any more complex or hard to remember than a standard postal code or zip code.

Now that sounds like a very useful system. It's hierarchical. With arbitrary precision. With ~short, easy to remember (and easy to key/speak on radio) codes. Nice.

Yes, W3W is stupid, but each address is a pointer to lots o bits.

Words in one language are very often ~gibberish words in other languages. And worse, because of false homonyms. And people with heavy accents.

Are you talking about existing English words? I'm not sure there are enough longer words for this to be possible, depending on the range of numbers being encoded.

No, I wasn't.

Sorry, I just don't get the point. Implementing a bunch of proprietary location-encoding schemes is just insane. I do see the profit motive, obviously. But I can only hope that people will avoid using stuff like this.

Maybe if it were totally open-source. And if it were implemented by some recognized international entity. Maybe some part of the UN.