Every spot on Earth has an address made of numbers, but there's more than one way to write it down. The same park bench can be 40.748817, -73.985428 in one app, 40°44'55.7"N 73°59'07.5"W in another, and "87G8P2X7+9P" on a map link a friend just sent. They all point to the same place — they're just different coordinate formats. Here are the five you'll actually run into — decimal degrees, DMS, UTM, MGRS, and Plus Codes — with worked examples and a plain answer to "which one should I use?"

Why coordinate formats exist at all

Latitude and longitude split the planet into a grid. Latitude measures how far north or south you are of the equator (0° at the equator, up to 90° at each pole). Longitude measures how far east or west you are of the Prime Meridian that runs through Greenwich, London (0° there, up to 180° on the far side). Pin down one of each and you've named a single point.

The disagreement isn't about where a place is — it's about how to write the numbers. Some formats favor copy-paste simplicity, some favor reading the value aloud, and some were designed so a number stays accurate even when it's smudged on a paper map in the field. Each format below is just a different notation for the same underlying grid.

1. Decimal Degrees (DD) — the everyday default

Decimal degrees writes latitude and longitude as two plain numbers with a decimal point. This is what you'll paste into Google Maps, what most apps copy to your clipboard, and the format most software speaks internally.

Format: latitude, longitude — latitude always comes first.
Signs: positive is North and East; negative is South and West. So -73.98 means 73.98° west.
Example: 40.748817, -73.985428 (the Empire State Building).

The number of decimal places sets the precision. A rough guide near the equator: 2 places ≈ 1 km, 4 places ≈ 11 m, 5 places ≈ 1 m, 6 places ≈ 10 cm. Five or six places is plenty for any everyday use; anything beyond that is surveying territory. DD is the easiest format to share and the one to use unless you have a specific reason not to.

2. Degrees, Minutes, Seconds (DMS) — the classic notation

DMS is the older, spoken-aloud style you see on nautical charts, aviation maps, and street signs. Instead of a decimal, it breaks each degree into 60 minutes, and each minute into 60 seconds — the same way an hour splits into minutes and seconds.

Format: 40°44'55.7"N 73°59'07.5"W
How to read it: 40 degrees, 44 minutes, 55.7 seconds North; 73 degrees, 59 minutes, 7.5 seconds West. The N/S and E/W letters replace the plus and minus signs.

To turn DMS into decimal degrees, divide minutes by 60 and seconds by 3600, then add them up: 44/60 + 55.7/3600 = 0.7488, so 40°44'55.7" becomes 40.7488°. Apply N/S/E/W last (West and South make it negative). DMS reads naturally out loud and survives well on printed maps, but it's fiddly to type and easy to mis-key — which is why software prefers DD. A coordinate converter handles the arithmetic for you in both directions.

3. UTM — meters instead of degrees

Universal Transverse Mercator throws out degrees entirely. It slices the globe into 60 vertical zones, each 6° of longitude wide, and within a zone it gives your position in plain meters: easting (meters east of a reference line) and northing (meters north of the equator).

Format: 18N 585628E 4511322N — zone, then easting, then northing.
Why people use it: because the units are meters, you can measure distance on a UTM map with a ruler and basic math, with very little distortion. Surveyors, hikers, and engineers like that.

The tradeoff is that UTM is awkward across long distances, since the numbers reset at each zone boundary. It's a working format for fieldwork, not for sharing a meetup spot in a text message.

4. MGRS — UTM with a grid-square shorthand

The Military Grid Reference System builds on UTM but packs everything into one compact string, which is handy when you're reading it aloud over a radio or writing it in a hurry.

Format: 18T WL 85628 11322 — grid zone, 100 km square ID, then easting and northing digits.
Built-in precision: the number of digits sets how precise it is. The whole thing down to 1 m, dropping digit-pairs to widen the area: 10 digits = 1 m, 8 digits = 10 m, 6 digits = 100 m, 4 digits = 1 km.

MGRS is used by militaries and emergency responders worldwide because it's terse, unambiguous, and degrades gracefully — you can give a rough fix fast and a precise one when there's time. For everyday navigation it's overkill, but it's worth recognizing when you see it.

5. Plus Codes — an address for places without one

Plus Codes (officially the Open Location Code) are a free, open system from Google that turns any spot into a short code built from letters and digits — no street name required. They're designed for the billions of places that don't have a reliable postal address.

Format: 87G8P2X7+9P — the + always sits four characters from the end. A longer code is a precise full address; a short code like P2X7+9P New York pairs a local code with a nearby town name.
How to read it: you don't, really — you paste it into a map and it resolves to a roughly 14 m × 14 m square. More characters mean a smaller, more precise square.

Plus Codes shine for sharing a remote cabin, a market stall, or a building entrance that an address can't capture. They're shorter than a full lat/long string and work offline once you know the code.

Which format should you use?

Format	Looks like	Best for
Decimal Degrees (DD)	40.748817, -73.985428	Everyday sharing, apps, copy-paste — the safe default
DMS	40°44'55.7"N 73°59'07.5"W	Nautical/aviation charts, reading aloud, older maps
UTM	18N 585628E 4511322N	Surveying, hiking, measuring distance in meters
MGRS	18T WL 85628 11322	Military and emergency response; compact, scalable precision
Plus Codes	87G8P2X7+9P	Places with no street address; short, shareable

For 90% of everyday situations, decimal degrees is the right answer: it's the most widely accepted, the easiest to paste, and the least error-prone to type. Reach for the others when a specific tool, map, or community expects them.

One point, many notations

None of these formats is "more correct" than the others; they all describe the same physical point, just in different handwriting. Once you can recognize each one, switching between them is mechanical, and you never have to retype a place by hand.

Want to try it? Find your own position in every format with what are my coordinates, swap any value between DD, DMS, UTM, MGRS, and Plus Codes with the coordinate converter, and once you have two points, measure the gap between them with the distance between coordinates tool.