Latitude and longitude finder for any city

Type a place and get its coordinates — in the three notations, with the country, the time zone and the population, so you can tell which Springfield you have found. It also runs backwards from a point, measures the distance and bearing between two places, and takes a whole list at once. Free, no account, no key, nothing stored.

What it does, and why it is here

A coordinate is easy to find and easy to get subtly wrong. There are dozens of Springfields, several Cambridges and more than one Paris, and a lookup that returns a single number with no context gives you no way to tell which one answered.

So this one returns the disambiguating facts alongside the numbers: the country, the administrative region, the population, the time zone. Population is the useful one, and it is also how the suggestions are ordered — the Paris with two million people comes before the Paris in Texas, and if you wanted Texas the list says so.

The second thing it does is give the coordinate in all three notations at once. Decimal degrees is what software wants, degrees-minutes-seconds is what maps and older documents print, and degrees with decimal minutes is what marine and aviation instruments use. Converting between them by hand is where the sign gets dropped and a position ends up in the wrong hemisphere.

What you fill in

• Place name — two letters is enough to start; the suggestions are ordered by descending population.
• Or a point instead of a name — leave the name empty and give a latitude and a longitude, and the answer lists the five nearest places. This is reverse geocoding: you have a coordinate from a photograph, a GPS track or a form, and you want to know where it is.
• Use my position — the browser’s own geolocation, if you would rather not type anything.
• Distance to, optional — a second place, by name or as latitude, longitude. The answer then adds the great-circle distance and the initial bearing from the first to the second.
• Several places at once — paste place names, one per line, and get the best match for each in the order given, downloadable as a CSV. This is the one that turns an afternoon of copy-pasting into a single request: a list of branches, a tour schedule, a column in a spreadsheet.

What you get back

• The coordinate in three notations — decimal degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds, and degrees with decimal minutes — on WGS 84, the datum GPS and every mapping service use.
• Country, region and population, so you can confirm you have the right place before you use the numbers.
• The time zone, as its IANA identifier — which is what any correct date calculation needs, far more than an offset.
• Distance and initial bearing to your second place, when you gave one: the great-circle distance, which is the shortest path over the sphere and not what a ruler on a flat map measures.
• The antipode of the top match — the point on the exact other side of the Earth.
• A CSV, when you gave a list — one row per name, in the order you typed them.
• And a button to carry the coordinates onward, since a latitude and longitude is usually the input to the next thing rather than an answer in itself.

What it does not do

It does not resolve street addresses. This is a gazetteer of places — cities, towns and villages — not a door-number geocoder; a house number needs a different kind of service.

It draws no map, and it keeps nothing: what you search for is used to answer and then forgotten.

The three ways a coordinate is written

The same point on the Eiffel Tower, in the three notations you will meet.

Latitude always comes first in all three — north-south, from −90 to 90 — then longitude, east-west, from −180 to 180. Reversing them is the classic error, and it usually lands you in the sea off West Africa, where latitude and longitude are both zero.

Questions

Is it free?

Yes. No account, no API key, no limit.

Do you keep what I search for?

No. The query is used to answer and then forgotten.

Which comes first, latitude or longitude?

Latitude. It is the north-south one, and it runs from −90 to 90 — so any pair whose first number exceeds 90 is reversed.

Why is my village missing?

The gazetteer holds populated places above a size threshold. Pick the nearest town, or use the reverse lookup with a coordinate from a map.

Can I look up a full street address?

No — places, not addresses. For a door number you want a street geocoder.

Which one do I pick when several come back?

Read the country and the population beside each. The list is ordered by population, so the one people usually mean is first.

What is WGS 84, and do I need to care?

The reference system GPS and every mapping service use. You need to care only if you are working from an old national survey, whose coordinates can differ by a hundred metres or more.

How do I get coordinates for a list of places?

Paste them one per line into the batch field and download the CSV. The rows come back in the order you typed them.

Are these coordinates good enough for a birth chart?

Yes, comfortably. A city-level coordinate is accurate to well within the precision an astrological chart needs; the time zone that comes with it matters far more.

Sources and further reading

• Geographic coordinate system — latitude, longitude and the notations.
• WGS 84 — the datum the numbers are on.
• Great-circle distance — why the distance is not a ruler on a flat map.