[arthurfm]

Using 'Free' could also be a nod to the fact that there are a lot of very similar sounding words in the What3Words system [1].

The What3Words word list is 40,000 words long. It is important that words in this list cannot be confused, otherwise they may be communicated incorrectly. For example band/banned, bare/bear, beat/beet are easily confused.

A quick inspection of their word list finds the following words that sound very, very similar to one another:

  equivalence   equivalents
  incidence     incidents
  incite        insight
  incompetence  incompetents
  independence  independents
  innocence     innocents
  instance      instants
  intense       intents
  lightening    lightning
  ordinance     ordnance

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

[richij]

> incompetence incompetents

Ironic ionic ;-)

[mbirth]

IIRC it’s designed so that similar sounding words are so far apart from each other that it’s clear that you’ve got something wrong. Meaning the w3w addresses are meant to be used with a vague idea of where you want to go.

[eddyg]

There are far too many word “collisions” that result in nearby (but not close enough to find someone) locations.

e.g.:

https://twitter.com/matthewwilkes/status/1388772924627333121

https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1387911525873197057

[cybergibbons]

Yeah, that's not true.

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

[mbirth]

From their FAQs[1]:

> The overwhelming proportion of similar-sounding 3 word combinations will be so far apart that an error is obvious,

However, it continues like this:

> but there will still be cases where potentially confusable word combinations are nearby. Our Autosuggest feature actively intercepts possible errors or confusions and highlights other possibilities to the user, helping to identify what might need to be checked.

So they rely on auto-suggest and people trying all suggested alternatives.

[1] https://support.what3words.com/en/articles/3577589-how-are-t...