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Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to imagine someone ensuring differentiation between minimums.unsettled.depends (Idaho), minimums.unsettled.depend (Alaska), minimums.unsettles.depend (Spain), and minimum.unsettles.depend (Russia) while typing them in on a t-9 style keypad with a 7 figure display in turbulence.

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That's easily fixed – just spell them out using the ICAO spelling alphabet!

I can't believe the What3Words person or people didn't normalize all words to be singular before canonizing the list.

That's ridiculous.

The word list is 40,000 long, so without plurals probably there aren't enough words that people could spell or even pronounce. A better fix would be making it "what four words" - I wonder if they'd already committed too much to the "three" concept before discovering the flaw? Either way, using phony statistics to make unwarrantable claims of accuracy is a poor workaround.

That seems like a huge flaw in their system, has it never been addressed?

No, and by my understanding it can't be, as the algorithm is now permanent.

But it's worse than that, there are confusables within small distances of each other:

https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...

https://w3w.me.ss/

Since the app gives you the words to say, and translates those back to coordinates on the receiving end, in theory they could alter the word list, at the cost of making any written-down version obsolete.

Maybe they should release a new service called What4ActuallyVettedWordsAndWordCombinations ;)

Aren't they trying to turn their word list into a subscription service? Obsoleting paper copies might be a feature.

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