[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.