ordloc

A free, hierarchical, self-checking geocode. Public domain (CC0).

Every ~2 m square on Earth gets a speakable address, in your choice of three interchangeable forms:

standard  edge.suit.paddle.trust.magic     5 common words + checksum
lite      drainage.rapid.journey.elongated 4 words + parity bit
compact   hinir-fanur-ligim                17 chars, for URLs/QR codes

ordloc — from Swedish ord, "word".

Why another geocode?

Because the popular word-based one is proprietary, and the open ones aren't speakable. ordloc gives you all of the following at once, which no existing scheme does:

• Free forever. CC0 spec, ~150 lines of public math, MIT/CC-licensed wordlists. No license, no SDK, no company that can disappear and take your addresses with it. Works fully offline.
• Hierarchical. Drop trailing words to zoom out: edge.suit.paddle is the ~280 m neighborhood containing edge.suit.paddle.trust.magic. Nearby places share leading words, so codes sort and index spatially.
• Self-checking. Standard codes embed a CRC-8: a misheard word is detected 99.6% of the time instead of silently pointing 200 km away.
• Uniform. Built on S2 cells: ~2.2 m cells at the equator and at 78°N alike. Worst-case decode error 1.79 m (beats a 3 m square).
• Forgiving. First four letters of each word suffice: edge.suit.padd.trus.magi decodes identically.

Usage

pip install .          # or: pip install -r requirements.txt

$ ordloc encode 58.5260 13.4870
standard  edge.suit.paddle.trust.magic
lite      drainage.rapid.journey.elongated
compact   hinir-fanur-ligim

$ ordloc decode edge.suit.paddle.trust.magic
lat=58.526002 lon=13.487010  cell~2.2 m (level 22)  check=ok

As a library:

from ordloc import encode_standard, decode_words
code = encode_standard(58.5260, 13.4870)
lat, lon, edge_m, level, check = decode_words(code)

Files

ordloc/            reference implementation + CLI + wordlists
test_ordloc.py     test suite (run: python test_ordloc.py)
SPEC.md             implementation-grade specification
requirements.txt    runtime dependency (s2sphere)
pyproject.toml      pip-installable package definition
LICENSE             CC0 1.0 dedication

Choosing a profile

Use standard by default — the checksum matters whenever a human relays a code by voice. Use lite when matching the 3-4 word length of other systems matters more than error detection. Use compact in URLs, QR codes, filenames, and logs.

Status & roadmap

v0.2, prototype quality. Known limitations and welcome contributions:

• JavaScript/browser port (needs a standalone S2 implementation)
• Localized wordlists (BIP-39 community lists exist for 10+ languages)
• Hilbert locality is statistical: points straddling S2 face edges don't share prefixes
• The 4096 list's edit-distance curation is heuristic; a phonetic (soundex/metaphone) pass would strengthen it

Related work

Plus Codes (Open Location Code) pioneered the open grid geocode; Geohash the hierarchical hash; what3words the word-triplet UX; ThisPlace (Placeware) an early open geohash-to-words experiment; proquints the pronounceable bit encoding. ordloc combines the open hierarchy of the first two with the speakability of the rest, and adds checksums.

Author

Magnus Strömberg — github@magnus.tech