[johnday]

If you're in the UK, moving the area by hundreds of miles would be obviously detectable. If you said to the operator "I don't know where I am, somewhere in the New Forest" and then you gave them a long/lat in Newcastle, they'd know to check again. Given that phone towers connect emergency calls to local dispatchers, even saying roughly where you are isn't necessary.

Long-lat are highly effective precisely because almost anyone can read a number [including dyslexic people], and because the concept of a numeric pair as a GPS location is understood, at least in passing, by almost everybody.

[JulianMorrison]

And if you're in many places globally, particularly the backwoods, you could displace or misread a digit, point out a location well away from your position, and still be pointing at "a forest".

Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.

Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission. That matters when eg: using a CB radio, or there's a blizzard blowing into a phone's pickup.

[johnday]

> Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.

You only need 3 decimal places for ~100m accuracy. So really you're talking a 5 digit number and a 4 digit number (in the UK). A sensible presentation of that data would not be hard to read for almost anyone who doesn't have sight problems.

Moreover, a service like the theoretical "999.gov.uk" could log a person's GPS location and give them (say) a three word codephrase to pass to the dispatcher to lookup the record on the backend. No more or less effort, but not proprietary and harder to mess up.

> Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission.

This is true. I don't think there's a good way to fix that with numbers.