[cybergibbons]

The word list already is 40k long. That's beyond most people's vocab and includes really awkward to spell words.

IMO, if the solution is to use words, then What4Words would have had a word list of less than 3000, resulting in a word list with less confusable words and more accessible to children and people who struggle to read or write.

[pmoriarty]

Spelling is the Achilles' heel of all word-based systems.

People who have trouble with spelling (such as non-native speakers of whatever language the words come from or children) may not be able to rely on word-based systems. Word-based systems are also going to be hampered by speakers of different accents.

Letter- and number-based systems are probably always going to be much more robust, especially when used with a standard phonetic alphabet[1]. There could even be a checksum letter/number to make the system even more robust. Unfortunately, such systems will never be as memorable or as easy to say as a few words (spelling issues aside).

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

[jeroenhd]

Spelling is very much an underappreciated problem. Written English is particularly bad, sometimes requiring memorization that's not much unlike Chinese characters, because of the written language not adapting to the vowel shifts and changes in pronunciation, as well as the mess of a history the language has gone through as it developed in the UK.

Children, dyslexics, non-native speakers, all will have a hard time writing down many words even if they're part of the top 1000 list.

With the right word set (avoiding homophones) and the presence of autocorrect (or an input only allowing the limited word list), you could probably create a pretty resilient system if you only take the most common words (top 1k would likely be sufficient). You'll need a longer address, but remembering six words is a lot easier than remembering six letters.

Sadly, the entire concept is flawed and doomed for as long as the goons of What Three Words operate their business like a failed media company, sending out threats, falsifying legal documents to enforce takedown requests, and lawyering up to anyone who even considers applying "their" algorithm on their own. "Their" idea may be patentable in the US, but in areas of the world where there is no such patent, these goons cannot take down the competition without lying and dishonesty and they've shown to do anything to prevent any competitor from entering the market.

[pmoriarty]

Using spelling correction on a limited word set that avoids ambiguities is a brilliant idea. It wouldn't solve every issue with word-based systems (for instance, people who don't speak the language will still have problems, and it obviously wouldn't be as reliable without a computer) but it's much better than W3W, and I hope whoever implements an open W3W alternative implements it.

[tdeck]

This is how competently-designed word list systems (like the PGP word list) work. The problem is that W3W appears to be a sloppy first approximation of a solution.

[vonuebelgarten]

The sad part is that this problem was solved decades ago with grid locators like Maidenhead[1]. It's a purely mathematical conversions with no lookup tables, cover the entire world and alternate pairs of letters with pairs of digits (so no confusing or language and culture dependent words).

Code becomes longer according to the required precision, so eight digits are enough for a typical city neighborhood, ten digits goes to a 30x20m block that is good for disambiguation even in the most dense urban areas. Adding more digits will work too, but that just more work.

A typical location would be something like: fm19oc75hv

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

[WaffleIronMaker]

Exactly. Admittedly, fm19oc75hv feels much less 'friendly' than broken.turned.ahead, but it is significantly more functional.

[flir]

> Spelling is the Achilles' heel of all word-based systems.

Stick with nouns? Then you can use icons as supplements. Ball, Pen, Light bulb, Burger, Guitar.

Possibly easier to translate between languages, too.

[pmoriarty]

How do you spell "guitar"?

It's not spelled like it sounds, and not every English speaker (never mind people who can't speak English) is going to know how to spell it. Some may try to spell it "gitar", "geetar" or even "getar", for example. While these maybe be "obviously" wrong spelling for skilled spellers, they're not so for everyone.

Even with a simple word like "ball", it's not obvious that it should have two l's at the end. Someone might spell it "bal" when they hear it.

Spelling reform[1] movements have pointed out these and many other issues with English spelling, but unfortunately the alternatives they've come up with are just not widely known, and at least some of them still have their own problems (such as lack of standardization due to different phonemic spellings for words spoken by people with different accents).

Even were there some magical alternate spelling system for English that was widely known among English speakers, it would still be a stumbling block for people who don't know English, as would the words of any other language.. as long as there are people who don't speak that language.

So any word-based system is going to be problematic and error-prone for some people.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_reform

[cortesoft]

We should clearly use Esperanto words.

[jameshart]

Ah yes, simple phonetic words like ‘light’ and ‘guitar’...

[fpig]

I don't disagree, but not sure why you associate poor spelling with non-native speakers.

[jfrunyon]

Because native speakers are much more likely to use English every day and therefore much more likely to successfully remember how to spell "successfully"?

I'm not sure why you think that part of the comment was controversial. Certainly you would agree that the vast majority of people who don't natively speak English would be unable to spell such words as "read"?

[berdario]

Native speakers don't necessarily use their native language every day, and in fact a non-native English speaker might use English every day.

There are cases in which non-natives might have better grasp of orthography compared to natives (which might be what GP is objecting to).

I'd be surprised if the vast majority of non native English speakers would fail to spell "read"... Otoh as a non-native, I struggle to be understood and properly differentiate letters like a-e, p-b, etc. So for that reason I use the Nato alphabet whenever I need to spell something

[jfrunyon]

I don't think you understand the difference between "likely" and "guaranteed".

> There are cases in which non-natives might have better grasp of orthography compared to natives (which might be what GP is objecting to).

Certainly. Neither me, nor the "GP" to which you refer ever said anything to the contrary.

> I'd be surprised if the vast majority of non native English speakers would fail to spell "read"

Really? Depending on how you pronounce it, if they even spelled an English word, it would be "red" or "reed". Are you trolling? You do realize most people who aren't native speakers of English don't speak any English, right?

[logifail]

> [..] fail to spell "read"

That's an excellent example to pick :)

"I find that book very hard to read" ( "An oboe is a reed instrument" )

and

"I read that book yesterday" ( "My car is red" )

Q: How do you explain to a non-native speaker how to pronounce the word 'read' when you say it aloud...

[WaffleIronMaker]

> Q: How do you explain to a non-native speaker how to pronounce the word 'read' when you say it aloud...

Easy! just give them some latitude and longitude coordinates and tell them to match it up on what3words.com.

[fpig]

If you see someone write "reed" instead of "read" or "rite" instead of "write", that's likely a native speaker.

[jfrunyon]

Bingo. Either more words, or fewer grid squares (f.e. instead of 3x3m grid, a 4x4m grid). I truly don't understand why they thought they needed 3m (10ft) of precision: my home has something like 10 What3Words addresses (80 if you count the yard and the other side of the duplex!). The old outhouse at the family ranch has more than one!

IMO, they also should have built redundancy (some form of error checking at least) into the encoding.

[noir_lord]

Funnily enough I did that math the other day when this kicked off.

It comes out to 4th root of ((510.1 trillion)/9) which is ~2743.8

Where it gets interesting is that it's only ~4752 for 1mx1m cells :)

Another use for `Correct Horse Battery Staple` I guess.

[kybernetikos]

I did one of these for fun at the beginning of the year, and ended up needing to spend way more time on the wordlist than I'd expected. In the end I felt that a list of 4096 words was a decent compromise between accuracy and is still fairly managable for trying to remove words that are too easy to mistake for each other. It lets you do everywhere on earth to slightly more accuracy than what3words in 4 words.

Something that what3words does is not have an obvious hierarchy of words (e.g. where the first one covers a larger area, and subsequent words home in). I didn't like that, but I understand why they do it - if a single word is going to cover a large area, you have to be extra careful that you don't choose something offensive for a particular region. By having no obvious structure, they get away with being less careful on the wordlist.

[eterm]

The issue of hierarchy is that it's orthogonal to having very different results for nearby areas.

With a hierarchy you immediately run into, "Am I in gibbons.apple.banana or was it gibbons.apple.bandana" which is just down the road.

Without hierarchy it jumps out that one of those results is improbable if tallied with any knowledge of roughly where the person is.

[kybernetikos]

As you say, the issues are orthogonal. I randomise my wordlist so places next to each other don't have words necessarily close to each other in the alphabet. But because it's hierarchical e.g. most places in the uk start 'bishop'. I think this is good because you learn to recognise places,but imagine if loads of places in India started with the word 'colony'... it's a problem you don't have to worry about if you don't use a hierarchical scheme.

https://wherewords.id/

[ehsankia]

> The word list already is 40k long

To be fair, if the lookup table is created properly, the majority of habited locations should be within the first two bands, which means you're really only using 2500, or 5000 of those words. That was the whole point of the banding system, I assume.

[cybergibbons]

It's promoted for use in search and rescue, so other bands are in use.

[mike_d]

I used to do SAR. Lost persons do a terrible job of communicating because they are afraid and often emotionally and physically drained. But if you have them on a radio or a cell phone, you can generally locate them without the persons direct assistance.

One of the many things that really annoys me about W3W is that it sucks for actual navigation. If I am at waffle.tire.sigh is that north or south of keys.sad.tree? Am I heading in the right direction?

[cybergibbons]

Yeah, multiple MRT members have contacted me to say this is a real struggle. If someone is on the move, it's virtually impossible to work out what direction they are going.

[jhgb]

I wonder where "correct horse battery staple" would be located...

[SamBam]

Looking at the 3 word-based W3W, for some reason they have "horses" and not "horse," but you can find both https://what3words.com/correct.horses.battery and https://what3words.com/horses.battery.staple, and interestingly enough they are both in Canada, one in Nunavut and the other in Quebec.

[jhgb]

"...if the solution is to use words, then What4Words would have had a word list of less than 3000, resulting in a word list with less confusable words..."

[SamBam]

I had ninja-edited to be clearer, but perhaps I was too slow. I was simply noting what the equivalent two locations would be in W3W.