What3words

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.

What3words Ltd.
what3words
Founded2013 (2013)
Founders
  • Chris Sheldrick
  • Jack Waley-Cohen
  • Mohan Ganesalingam
  • Michael Dent
HeadquartersLondon, England, UK
  • −£46.4M
 (2022)
  • −£31.5M
 (2022)
Number of employees
152 (2022)
Websitewww.what3words.com

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.

The company has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API for bidirectional conversion between What3words addresses and latitude–longitude coordinates.

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