According to the UK-based company What3words, I live at offers.reform.curve in Brooklyn. I work for Condé Nast, which has offices in downtown Manhattan at words.artists.names—but today I'm working from a coffee shop at reason.divide.hardly. Afterward, I’ll be drinking at trick.pills.prompting.

These little Mad Libs are amusing, but likely have you wondering why you need a new address in the first place. Fair question. If you live in the developed world, you probably don't; Google Maps knows where you live, and so does the mail carrier.

But that’s not true everywhere. The United Nations estimates that 70 percent of the world is unaddressed, and struggles because of it. “Addresses are more than just a place where the post goes,” says Charles Prescott, founder of the Global Address Data Association. “It’s an indicator of who you are. It’s a tool people use to distinguish human beings.” Imagine applying for a job or a bank account without an address—it's near impossible.

What3words and other so-called geocoding companies are trying to solve that problem. Addressing the Unaddressed, for instance, creates alphanumeric address codes for people living in Calcutta’s slums. Addressing Homes uses a grid-based, numerical address system for people in Liberia.

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What3words puts a more lexical spin on the problem. “Words are so much easier to remember,” says Giles Rhys Jones, the company's CMO. “But digits, your chances of remembering them is zero.” This is at least partly true: you can probably recite your phone number, after all, but consider the password to your wireless router. You're simply not going to memorize a 16-character string of alphanumeric code. But you can remember a four-word in-joke you share with your roommates.

What3words overlays the planet with a grid of 57 trillion plots of cubicle-sized land, and uses an algorithm to assign each of them a three-word phrase. What3words avoids homophones like “hear” and “here," and also does away with proper nouns. And the schema is actually getting some traction. If you find yourself injured in the woods at Glastonbury Festival, alerting a medical crew to your location is as simple as sharing the three-word description of your 10-foot by 10-foot location. If you live in Mongolia and buy something from an online retailer that ships with Mongol Post, you can enter your three-word address on the vendor's checkout page. And this week, global shipping provider Aramex led a $8.5-million round of funding for What3words, and will use the system to fulfill e-commerce orders in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

Still, it's not perfect. What3words lacks what Prescott calls an “obvious, self-explanatory consecutiveness." In other words: You can't infer the location of a place from its three-word name alone. In the US; if you’re looking for a house at 327 E. Maple Avenue, you know a good place to look for it is along East Maple Ave., and that it'll probably be across the street from 328 E. Maple Ave.

But rural Mongolia and the informal settlements that dot Rio de Janeiro’s hillsides have few if any linear streets. What3words' solution could be just the ticket. It's a big world—certainly big enough for more than one mapping system.