Advertisement

The misheard word that directed public to mourn late Queen in Yosemite

People queue next to the Tate Modern to pay their respects to the Queen - CARL DE SOUZA/AFP
People queue next to the Tate Modern to pay their respects to the Queen - CARL DE SOUZA/AFP

Snaking through London, the queue to see Queen Elizabeth II lying in state ran for 4.4 miles on Thursday, stretching from Westminster to Tower Bridge and beyond.

However, those looking to join the back of the line might have been forgiven for thinking it began 5,300 miles away in Fresno, California.

The reason for the confusion was a choice by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to use a British app to help mourners find the end of the queue.

The app, called What3words, uses a combination of three words to pinpoint a grid address anywhere in the world. Its map is broken up into 57 trillion three-metre squares, each with a unique identifier made up of three words.

For example, the late Queen’s coffin is lying in the centre of Westminster Hall on a catafalque. The middle of Westminster Hall, according to What3words, is addressed as hurls.elbows.jumped.

But problems have arisen further down the queue. The first location posted by DCMS officials on their YouTube livestream of the line was supposed to be same.valve.grit, a spot next to Blackfriars Bridge.

Unfortunately, the address they actually posted as same.valve.grid, more than 5,300 miles away near Yosemite in California.

The error is easily missed. Civil servants appear to have typed “grid” instead of “grit”, potentially after mishearing the word.

The mistakes continued. Another location, keen.lifted.fired, was listed on the official map of the queue as keen.listed.fired, suggesting it began near Leeds in Yorkshire.

A third reference to shops.view.paths was supposed to show the line beginning near the Tate Modern. Instead, the location listed to the public was shops.views.paths - adding an “s” - which was a spot near the city of Charlotte in North Carolina.

The app’s astronomical combinations of words make it a handy alternative to using traditional Ordnance Survey grid references. These use a combination of lettered grid squares and a six-digit numerical grid reference to find an exact location on a traditional map. Another alternative, longitude and latitude references, uses a complex string of two numbers to find a position relative to the equator.

The logic of using What3words, therefore, is the app can provide a more intuitive location for a place without needing a postal address. The company describes itself as “the simplest way to talk about location”.

Its site says: “Street addresses aren’t accurate enough to specify precise locations, such as building entrances, and don’t exist for parks and many rural areas.

“This makes it hard to find places and prevents people from describing exactly where help is needed in an emergency.”

The queue to pay respects to the late Queen at Westminster is almost five miles long - Carl Court/Getty Images
The queue to pay respects to the late Queen at Westminster is almost five miles long - Carl Court/Getty Images

The app was the brainchild of Chris Sheldrick, 41, who founded What3words in 2013 with Jack Waley-Cohen, Mohan Ganesalingam and Michael Dent.

The inspiration came from Sheldrick’s decade spent working as an event organiser in the music industry.

“Every day we were going somewhere else, whether Gate B42 at Wembley Stadium or a back entrance of some villa up a mountain in Italy,” Sheldrick told The Telegraph in 2019, “addresses rarely pointed to the actual place you wanted.”

Vans, musicians and equipment would regularly get lost or delayed looking for the right entrance or backstage loading areas. So Sheldrick began working on an idea to fix it.

Plenty of people have bought into the company formed to commercialise that idea. In the UK, 100 emergency services branches have started using What3words to help with locating people in need.

The company has raised more than £80m from a clutch of blue chip investors. Backers include Mercedes Benz-maker Daimler, Intel, Channel 4, ITV, Ikea and former Formula 1 driver Nico Rosberg. Its recent funding rounds suggest a valuation of around £170m, according to Companies House filings. It turned over £459,000 in the 12 months ending in December and made a loss of £16m, according to its latest accounts.

But not everyone agrees that Sheldrick’s idea makes for a better form of mapping.

Last year, mountain rescuers said they faced trouble locating people using the app. “We are finding there are a lot of spelling issues, which might be from when locations are given to the emergency services,” Mark Lewis, head of ICT at Mountain Rescue England and Wales told the BBC.

Andrew Tierney, a cyber security consultant who has closely examined What3words’ technology, thinks there are too many homophones - similar-sounding words - in the list of terms used by the mapping site to mark out unique locations on the Earth’s surface.

“Of those 40,000 words, there's 7,697 which also exist in a plural form,” he says. “So that's 15,924 in total where you can just add or remove an S, which is quite a lot.”

Concerned by emergency services’ use of What3words in light of this potential source of confusion, Tierney analysed the website’s workings (and wordings) last summer. His most concerning finding was two locations with very similar-sounding What3words references that were, in fact, on opposite sides of the River Clyde: likely.stages.sock and likely.stage.sock.

“The biggest concern is really that they said they had designed out this issue where making a mistake would place you on the other side of the world,” added Tierney.

“But it turns out they haven’t. In fact, it’s almost inherent that you will find [location] pairs that are really close to each other.”

What3words co-founder Chris Sheldrick wanted to create an alternative to Ordnance Survey maps - what3words
What3words co-founder Chris Sheldrick wanted to create an alternative to Ordnance Survey maps - what3words

The company admitted last year that its technology “rightly receives public scrutiny because of its use by emergency services”, but defended its efforts to mitigate potential confusion.

It says What3words uses a concept it calls “shuffling” to locate hard-to-spell words far out at sea. It also tries to remove obvious homophones to avoid confusion.

A What3words spokesman said: "We know people make errors sometimes. The What3words autosuggest system picks up errors in spelling, typing, speaking, mishearing and misremembering. Similar sounding three word locations are typically far away from each other. The chance of potentially confusable combinations appearing ambiguously close to each other in the UK is estimated at about 1 in 25 million."

Still, What3words has continued to attract use from emergency services, governments and car makers at a rapid pace. Some 85pc of blue light services make use of the app and have been encouraging the public to download it.

Gill Pleming, a service manager at the Welsh Ambulance Service, says What3words has saved its responders "time when it matters most". She says its call handlers were trained to use the service to avoid any human error when relaying words.

After the initial hiccups, the What3words locations for the queue to view the late Queen lying in state have largely been correct. Officials at DCMS were said to have realised the errors were due to civil servants manually inputting the words. They later moved to a new method where the location codes were filled out automatically.

But those planning to pay their respects to the late Queen this weekend may want to double check their spelling before they set out.