Long/lay are indeed accurate, but are cumbersome to communicate verbally. In the parent comment you are responding to, loud wind and other background noise would make accurately transmitting a long string of numbers equally if not more difficult.

Unlike lat/long, which requires precise addressing, words can have an inherent error-correction mechanism built into them, wherein the listener may not hear the entire word, but can piece it together. This admittedly is of less use for W3W where the word sets are random and not related to each other. That said, if you were in receipt of a garbled w3w code, you could theoretically narrow down your search parameters using the parts of it you heard.

That’s maybe giving w3w more benefit of the doubt than deserved, though.

Numbers are also spoken using words, and the words for digits 1-9 have fairly distinct sounds with the possible exception of five and nine. W3w's advantage is more in the small number of words required.

I can't think of many use cases where w3w would be more convenient than an app/protocol for simply transmitting your GPS location to another person. Maybe if you had a GPS connection and mobile signal but no internet connection.

> W3w's advantage is more in the small number of words required

Digits have ten words. If five and nine are confusing, imagine trying to guess if the person meant flower, flour or floor, and guessing according to their accent.

If one to ten is confusing, you can always find 10 or 100 very distinct words to replace digits or pairs of them. You could also press numbers on your phone's keypad, or even send them as morse or binary.

> imagine trying to guess if the person meant flower, flour or floor

I'd hope that w3w's word list is built to avoid this potential confusion, but I could be wrong.

> you can always find 10 or 100 very distinct words to replace digits or pairs of them

True, although if you wanted to spread news by word of mouth of a secret gathering in the woods, then having just three words for the location is easy to remember and transmit.

Beyond those very niche edge cases, I don't really see much point.

The article you are replying to is invalidating those points.

Well lat long is the standard for marine operations and a mayday call uses it. In order to get a marine radio licence you have to demonstrate that you can correctly transmit a mayday. It works OK in noisy conditions because we say it in a standard format that everyone is expecting. E.g “My position is North five four decimal six three one East zero zero six decimal five two niner” this should probably be taught in school, my kids were taught basic CPR in primary school here so I don’t see why this couldn’t be taught this too.

Do you have decimal degrees or degrees minutes second? Did you remember the "-" sign? Is Lat and Lon in the right order?

Thus, geocoding, like MGRS or Plus Code.