Address → Coordinates
Type an address, postcode, or place name and get its exact latitude and longitude, plotted on the map below.
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What is forward geocoding?
Forward geocoding is the process of converting a text description of a location — a street address, a postcode, a landmark or place name — into a coordinate pair a computer can plot, measure and compare. It's the operation behind a sat-nav accepting a typed-in address, a checkout page validating a delivery address, or a spreadsheet of shop locations being mapped onto a sales territory. Typing "Big Ben, London" into the box above and getting back a latitude and longitude is forward geocoding in its simplest form.
How a GIS resolves an address to a point
Underneath, forward geocoding is handled by a geographic information system (GIS) — a database that has already indexed millions of place names, street segments and postcodes against known coordinates. When a query comes in, the geocoder parses it into components (building or landmark name, street, locality, postcode, country), matches those components against its reference data, and returns the best match. Where there's no exact record for a specific address, it interpolates a position — estimating, for example, where house number 42 falls along a street segment it knows runs from number 2 to number 60.
Coordinates and the WGS 84 datum
Latitude and longitude aren't meaningful on their own — they're only meaningful relative to a datum, a mathematical model of the Earth's shape used as the reference frame for plotting positions. British mapping has traditionally used OSGB36, tied to the Ordnance Survey National Grid, while GPS, satellite navigation and virtually all web mapping — Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, and this tool — use WGS 84 (World Geodetic System 1984). Because the two datums model the Earth's surface slightly differently, a coordinate pair from a GPS device and an old OS grid reference for the same physical spot can differ by tens of metres. This tool returns WGS 84 latitude and longitude in decimal degrees — the format you'll want for pinning a location on this map, on most other web maps, and for satnav or GPS devices.