What3Words is a cool service that takes clunky GPS coordinates like 52.1261450, -106.6589970 and turns them into phrases, like twisty.wedding.runs, that are much easier to both say and remember.
But I’ve got some ideas for how it could be even better.
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There’s no denying that it’s a useful system - much more compatible with the human brain than a long string of meaningless digits - and it’s being used all over the world to help first responders. Especially when the respondees don’t know where they are.
But three things have always bothered me about the system.
The words they use to form addresses include singular and plural nouns, as well as many different conjugations of verbs. This leads to easy confusion. For example: server.collects.engine is in New York State, but servers.collects.engine is in Korea, and servers.collect.engine is in the Philippines. If you didn’t immediately spot the distinctions, that’s exactly the problem - they’re so similar. If you were a lost backpacker who misread it, or your rescuer misheard you, you could have a long wait before help arrived.
Any word can occur in any position. So server.collect.engine and engine.collect.server are both valid, and both in Idaho, but they’re 100 miles apart. Meanwhile, collect.server.engine is in Montana. People reading it from a screen are not likely to get the order wrong, but it’s easy to do when you’re reciting it from memory.
The phrases are just random words jammed together - often without even being grammatically correct. The phrase “servers collects engines” is improper English, but it’s a valid w3w address and points to a location in Nevada. So speaking English well is no help in catching errors.
But whether your server(s) are collecting engine(s) or the other way around, none of those word combinations evoke a particularly strong image. Some addresses do, like rabbits.haunting.alligators, which is in Australia, but such happy accidents are rare. And that’s a shame, because imagery like this is fun, and makes the address so much easier to remember.
The root of all these problems, I think, is that the current scheme needs a lexicon of 40,000 different words to divide the planet into 3x3m squares. And to get that many distinct words to work with, they need to use plurals and conjugations.
But 40,000 words is a lot. It would definitely strain the vocabulary of people who don’t speak English well. Just imagine a poor guy in Jordan trying to call for help at carousels.habituated.petrified. Unless his English is excellent, those are just nonsense syllables, similar to you trying to remember dawwāmāt.mutād.mutahajjir. Is that any easier to remember than 31.0802740, 36.6626540?
But with a couple of simple changes, you could dramatically improve the system, and at the same time, reduce the number of words needed to just 2000 - a much more comfortable vocabulary size, even for those with only basic English.
Change 1: Use a 4-word address instead of 3. At first blush, you might think four words is harder to remember than three, but we’re going to make another change.
Change 2: Instead of combining words randomly, you assign them as noun, verb, adjective, noun. We’ll need about 1500 nouns, 300 verbs, and 200 adjectives to do it, but suddenly the combinations become much more visual, yielding addresses like: woman.tickles.friendly.iguana or knight.devours.fragrant.apple.
In my view, these are much more memorable - even with the extra word added on - but there are other advantages as well.
For example, you can tell right away that friendly.iguana.tickles.woman would be an illegal address, because friendly is an adjective, but it’s in the first position, which is expected to be a noun.
Furthermore, because you need so many fewer words in your lexicon, you can provide even better error correction by treating all variations of a word as being identical. Treat woman and women as the same value. Equate devour, devours, devoured, and devouring. Make apple equal to apples, and so on.
And to eliminate another source of error, we’ll also equate homophones and variant spellings: knight will be equated with night, plain with plane, donut with doughnut, etc.
With those equivalencies in place, it wouldn’t matter whether you said night.devours.fragrant.apple or misremembered it as knights.devouring.fragrant.apples. Both addresses would point to the same square.
Easier to remember, more distinct words, familiar to more people, with fewer chances for confusion or accidental location swapping, and largely self-correcting. What’s not to love? We can call it These4Words.
Quick! Somebody reserve the domain name.
My journey with learning Norsk hit an unexpected landmine today, all because of our new curtains.
Having learned a decent amount of French in school, I’m passingly familiar with the notion of gendered nouns. So the masculine, feminine, and neuter categories in Norwegian weren’t a problem. And learning that many people collapse the feminine and masculine into a single common gender came as a welcome simplification. But then we bought the damned curtains.