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Comment by brechmos | Hacker News Reader

I didn't see any discussion in the article of having different languages but the what three word website talks about it.

One thing that I don't quite understand is two locations very near each other have completely different sets of words. I would have thought there would be some sort of hierarchy of words (sort of like geocoding a lat long where it defines a box and the precision of the geocoding gives you larger or smaller boxes).

I wonder too if there are going to be collisions of words and locations that aren't going to make people too happy. Though they must have thought through that too.

Either way it is an interesting idea.

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If Wikipedia is to be believed, that's intentional as an error-detecting mechanism:

"The result is that if you enter athree-word combination slightly incorrectly and the result is still a valid w3w reference, the location will be so far away from the user’s intended area that it will be immediately obvious to both a user and an intelligent error-checking system."

I'm skeptical of just how well that'll work, personally. Witness the example of the truck driver who drove to Gibraltar, England instead of the one next to Spain.

It did say intelligent error checking. People have proven themselves to be idiots.

It's designed to be dependent on their proprietary implementation.

MGRS is (approximately) a dense encoding of UTM coordinates, at similar precision it's a lot less memorable than 3 words:

4QFJ 12345 67890

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system )

But it does have the property that coordinates are easy to compare to each other. Less precision can be used just by dropping digits:

4QFJ 1234 6789 - the 10 meter zone that the 1 meter zone above falls inside

4QFJ 123 678 - the 100 meter zone

Experimenting with their map, You get a new set of words every square foot or so.

If you don't like the 3 words it gives you, just offset the location by a foot or two until you find a set of 3 words you like.

The idea is brilliant, however

> If you don't like the 3 words it gives you

After trying some locations, I think they should have purged their dictionary of obviously negative words. Ending up with `glorified.bodily.passage` is just bad luck and can't be avoided, but `snored`, `brainwashed` or `grieved` are just bad in any context.

Also, some ground offset in meters (grazed.across.like.7) or the ability to go beyond 3x3 meters like a fractal would allow you to specify individual drawers or even pencils inside them.

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