Anyone interested in this sort of thing should check out google's S2 projection, which is a space filling curve over the surface of a cube, where the orientatio

Anyone interested in this sort of thing should check out google's S2 projection, which is a space filling curve over the surface of a cube, where the orientation of the cube was chosen such to put the most problematic points out over the ocean. This has some nice advantages over just using a mapping from lat/long to a single square curve. What3Word's bullshit pissed me off enough I fooled around with an open system based on the EFF's word lists some years back. If you combine them you can address any place on earth with 2 meter precision using 4 words, or 40 meter precision with 3 words. I was just curious about how the numbers worked out so I never coded up anything meaningful to share, but I think it's an interesting idea. I also don't wanna get into any IP nonsense with people as obviously scummy and connected as W3W. Compared to geohash the word granularity makes addressing rectangles vs points much more "chunky" but I think that's a tolerable tradeoff for a lot of applications.