What are my coordinates?

What these numbers mean

Two numbers locate any point on Earth. Latitude is how far north or south you are of the equator, from 0° to 90°. Longitude is how far east or west of the line through Greenwich, from 0° to 180°. This page prints them in decimal degrees, with N, S, E or W after each, which is the form almost every map, phone and search box accepts.

You will also see them written with a minus sign instead of a letter — 52.3676, -4.9041 — where negative means south or west. The two notations mean exactly the same thing.

Underneath is a Plus Code: eleven characters with a + in the middle that encode the same position. It is not a second opinion. It is the same coordinates in a form built to be said out loud and typed without error, and it is open and free to use. Your device computes it here, on this page, from the numbers above — nothing is looked up to produce it.

Why the last digits move

Watch the numbers for a minute while standing still and the final digits will drift. Nothing is wrong; you are watching the honest output of a sensor.

The digits are worth knowing in metres. At the fourth decimal place, one step in the last digit is about 11 metres of latitude. At the fifth it is about 1 metre, at the sixth about 11 centimetres. Consumer GNSS does not resolve anything near a centimetre, so a page printing six decimals is printing noise and calling it precision.

So this page prints as many decimals as the fix has earned and no more. If your device reports a wide accuracy radius, you get fewer digits — not because the number was rounded for tidiness, but because the digits it would otherwise show are not known. The accuracy figure beside the answer tells you which case you are in, in metres or kilometres. The Plus Code shortens for the same reason: a shorter code is a complete, resolvable code for a larger box, not a truncated one.

Reading them out to someone

Coordinates exist to be handed over — to a dispatcher, a coastguard, a friend driving to find you — and that is where their weaknesses show.

Read the digits in small groups rather than as one long number, and say the decimal point. Say the cardinal letter at the end, every time: swapping north for south moves you to the opposite hemisphere, and it is the single most common transcription error there is. If the person on the other end can take a Plus Code, give them that instead — it is shorter, it has no minus signs or decimal points to lose, and it cannot be silently transposed into a valid but wrong position the way two decimal numbers can.

One thing worth knowing about this page in particular: it works with no signal. Your coordinates and your Plus Code come from your device's own receiver and are computed on the device. Nothing above needed the network, so if you have no data, no bars, or no working mobile plan, this page still answers. That is deliberate, and it is the situation it was built for.

Why an app should show you the accuracy figure at all is a longer argument.