The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

Giles took me to see Jamie Brown, a kind-faced young linguist with reddish hair knotted in a loose bun, who helps to translate the map into other languages. It’s not just a matter of translating the existing word map into the new language. Instead, what3words hires native speakers, often culled from linguistics programs at London universities, to speak each word out loud to rule out homophones that would be confusing—blue and blew, for example. The advisers also sift out rude words or slang. (The word “tortoise” doesn’t appear in the Bengali list because some people think it’s bad luck to have one in your house.) They weed out words that don’t work; Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, for example, meaning “insurance companies providing coverage for legal expenses” is too long for an address whose selling point is brevity. And they make sure that every word is unique to all editions of the map—barn, the Norwegian word for “child,” can’t be used in the Norwegian map because “barn” already appears in the English-language version. Eventually the linguists cleverly whittle down the list of words. And then the most familiar words are allocated to places on the map where speakers of the language are most likely to live. On the French map, the word chat (“cat”) is likely to form part of a what3words address in Paris, or perhaps Montreal. On the Korean map, the word for cat will appear most often in Seoul. Less common and more complicated three-word addresses were put in the A...