What3words: the ingenious mapping app that's saving lives around the world
Last month Jess Tinsley, a 24-year-old from Newton Aycliffe in County Durham, got lost at night in Hamsterley Forest while hiking with friends. "We were in a field and had no idea where we were," said the care worker. When they finally found some phone signal, they called 999, and were told to download an app.
It may sound like unnecessary bureaucracy, but the police were in fact pointing Tinsley to a service helping to speed up such rescue missions. Using what3words, the mountain rescue team was able to accurately locate the exact spot where the group were stranded, via a simple three-word code: kicked.converged.soccer.
What3words is the brainchild of Chris Sheldrick, who, alongside Mohan Ganesalingam, Michael Dent and Jack Waley-Cohen, founded the company in 2013. Sheldrick has long had an interest in issues related to addresses and postcodes. Growing up in rural Hertfordshire, visitors were rarely able to locate his house.
"It was when I worked for 10 years in the music business that it became more of a daily problem," Sheldrick explains. "Every day we were going somewhere else, whether Gate B42 at Wembley Stadium or a back entrance of some villa up a mountain in Italy. Addresses rarely pointed to the actual place you wanted."
Sheldrick's initial experiment proved too complex for the music industry – GPS coordinates are a little ungainly. So he enlisted his friend Ganesalingam, a mathematician, to come up with a more user-friendly system.
The result is what3words, which divides the world into three-metre squares – that's 47 trillion in total. It then assigns each square a unique three-word combination, calling upon a dictionary for 40,000 words. (
By tapping a button on the app, you can deduce your code in seconds. For example, the first ball of the fourth Ashes test at Old Trafford on Wednesday will be delivered from stored.spite.window. Over at 10 Downing Street, Boris Johnson lives at slurs.this.shark (make of that what you will.)
To avoid confusion, similar-sounding codes, like table.chair.spoon or table.chairs.spoon, are dispersed as widely as possible across the globe.
Once you have your code, you can sync it to your regular directions app, such as Google Maps or Waze, or send to a friend who can then easily find you – particularly useful at crowded festivals, for example, where "I'm by the burger stall" might not cut it.
But it's the emergency services that are finding what3words particularly useful. Currently, 46 UK services – police, fire, ambulance and coast guard – have signed up.
"Every day I'm looking for somebody that I can't find," says Sam Thompson of Cambridgeshire Constabulary. "Either a criminal or a victim, in one way or the other, I'm always trying to find a particular location, and the directions I have aren't particularly good."
What3words is seen as "more accurate than a postal address and more memorable than GPS coordinates." Dropping a pin, for example, may be useful if you're both on the same digital platform, but very often that isn't the case. Coordinates are accurate, but typing them in is a pain. At the moment it only works in 2D, so if you're up a building, you need to find the entrance's code.
"We knew it would have a lot of power for those situations where you have to communicate a location very quickly, and very precisely, where every second counts," Sheldrick explains. Emergency services have always struggled with deciphering nebulous directions, so many are now actively encouraging the use of what3words – if you don't have the app, they'll send you an SMS link.
What3words works across the world, at any location, even if you're offline. Once you've downloaded the app (there's a website, too) the whole algorithm is there. If you're hiking in the British countryside, therefore, where there are still plenty of signal-free zones, you can still find your location. Someone can then find signal and alert the emergency services of the three-word combination.
And it's not just being used here in Britain (it's available in 36 languages). In countries with little formal address system, or regularly changing situations due to things like earthquakes or bulldozed dwellings, the three-word system can still provide accurate direction.
Which is why it has become popular with those engaged in humanitarian aid. From the UN to various NGOs, from the Philippine Red Cross to aid workers after the Mexico Earthquake in 2017, the service is helping improve rescue missions around the world.
Its reach is already wide. In new Mercedes and Ford cars you can type in or say your three-word code and activate navigation. Mongolia has changed its address system to what3words, and the Lonely Planet offers it in its guide books. The National Farmers Union has endorsed it and praised its ability to offer accurate geolocation anywhere on the farm – ideal, say, if a vet needs to rush to an emergency.
Sheldrick believes the system will soon be ubiquitous. The three slashes prefix, which signifies a three-word address, "will be as synonymous as the @ symbol is to Twitter," he predicts.
