Do you have a special place? Maybe the place you grew up, where you met your partner, had your first kiss or where your child was born. Wouldn’t it be nice to carry a reminder of that place around with you every day in the form of a piece of jewellery?

In the world, every location has a set of coordinates from which it can be identified. Lots of companies offer personalised items of jewellery on which the latitude longitude coordinates of your special place can be added. However, a new company is taking the idea of coordinates one step further and has given every grid square a unique three-word address.

This is especially helpful in areas where traditional addresses do not exist, in areas where constant development is taking place, rural areas or parkland, or in countries that are underdeveloped.

It’s also a fun and easy way to remember addresses in cities as well. It can be easy to make mistakes with latitude and longitude coordinates and a three-word address is much easier to communicate to others without error as you don’t need to remember long number coordinates.

What 3 Words have divided the earth’s surface into 3m x 3m grid squares and allocated them an easy to remember three-word address. Each one is intentionally randomised and unrelated to any surrounding squares. Addresses which sound similar are placed as far away from each other as possible to avoid confusion. Their system automatically accounts for any spelling mistakes or typing errors which may have been made when entering an address in the search facility and will make suggestions based on three word addresses nearby. 

The three-word system which was developed in 2013 by Chris Sheldrick who originated from the music industry. He decided there was a need for a more accurate addressing system when music equipment and bands kept getting lost trying to find venues using traditional addresses. Since it was introduced the system has been adopted by many major businesses worldwide with more starting to use it all the time.

Ever been at a festival, concert or large-scale event and lost your friends? The three-word system is set up to work offline and is great for large scale events where high demand can make mobile signals and internet access patchy and unreliable. Not only can it make meeting up with friends far easier than saying, “meet me by the second tree to the left of the stage”, but also enables emergency staff like medics, security and police to find out the location where their help is required quickly and easily if a situation occurs.

After recent earthquakes, floods and tornadoes in different countries across the world; humanitarian groups have been using this system to get help and aid to people who need it. By using the three-word system they can drop off aid packages to specific areas or assess the level of damage in each grid square giving them a clearer picture of how the disaster has affected the general area.

I’m sure you are wondering how can this help the average person day to day? Using this system can make meeting up with friends easier, especially when going to places with more than one exit. Lots of parks, concert venues and shopping centres have more than one entrance/exit with this you can give a direct address label to your friend who can then use their preferred mapping app to take them to the correct place. If you live in a new housing estate it can take a while for traditional addresses to be added to Sat Nav programmes, causing issues with deliveries. 

If you would like to carry a reminder of your special place close to you all the time this system could be used to identify the 3 words you would like on a piece of jewellery, making it totally individual to you. With our custom engraving option most items within our latitude / longitude collection could be adapted to include a three-word address; for instance, a bracelet with the three-word address of where you proposed would make a lovely gift for your fiancé.

What 3 words represent your special place? Leave a comment below.

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