Say we grant statehood to a hypothetical possession whose name starts with M.
MA,MD,ME,MI,MN,MO,MS, and MT are already taken. What if its name has only those letters in it; in other words, no unique abbreviation can be formed from the first letter, M, and any other letter? Would an arbitrary letter be assigned, e.g.:MB, or would the government go to the second letter?
Well this is certainly a question you don’t get every day. If the great state of Madenosit wants to be admitted, I suppose we could use MM or MX looks cool. There isn’t a computer program that decides these things. People sit down and pick an abbreviation. There are viable options even in this rather unlikely scenario.
I presume the new citizens of Manedostia would suffer the fate of airports whose logical three-letter code is already taken: something would be assigned on another basis. Perhaps the country code, US, or the capital city. My guess would be either MU (Manedostia, United States of America) or MM (Manedostia. Repeat: Manedostia). But I don’t know what the Post Office procedure for this is, and their website isn’t exactly forthcoming on the subject of hypothetical state codes.
The Northern Mariana Islands had a version of this problem already. They are MP (There is another M) and they found an abbreviation with a letter that doesn’t appear in its common name.
I don’t think there’s any official guidance on this subject, but I think they would try to start with the same first letter as the state (i.e. M) if at all possible to avoid confusion.
By the way, MP is the U.S. postal abbreviation for the Northern Mariana Islands (as I see on preview that Shagnasty has mentioned), and MH is the one for the Marshall Islands, so that leaves only 16 letters to combine with M.
Go to 3 letter abbreviations for the states’ names?
As a Programmer I have to first say :eek:
Then say this could employ more programmers than even Y2K did.
It would be very expensive for business is the Government went to a 3 letter state. It would be easier to change the name of the new State.
Jim
As you may have noticed, you don’t need to wait for statehood – seems like any US possession with enough permanent population that you have to set up some sort of civil territorial administration, the USPS will assign it a code. http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/abbr_state.txt
I suppose MM and MU, as mentioned, would be the simplest answers, and that they’ll hope that whoever handles the affair has enough foresight to give the territorial entity an official name that gives you spare letters, such as “District of Maedinsot”, “Commonwealth of the Mainstedo Archipelago”, “Misteanod Territory”, or “Ronaldreaganland” 
. See for instance Micronesia, that by its official name “The Federated States of Micronesia”, enables postal abbreviation "FM"as opposed to MC
Regarding the Northern Mariana Islands, I suspect “MP” stands for Marianas/Pacific – they were the first of the pieces of the Trust Territory of the Pacific (TT) to spin off. NM was taken, and though they could have been “MR”, it was probably decided to avoid confusion with the Marshalls or Micronesia.
Palau’s PW is apparently an ISO code for that island as well as a USPS abbreviation, but I have no idea which was first.
Actually, you’re right – Congress can decide what to name a state, and changed Washington (originally Columbia) and Colorado (originally Idaho) at the last minute.
I knew Washington was Columbia, but I never realized it was Congress that made the decision. First I heard of the Colorado switch.
Only laziness, I am not doubting you, but could you link to anything on these, it interest me.
Jim
I know Utah was going to be Deseret, but I never heard about Colorado/Idaho before.
They could always just drop the M in Madenosit and give it AD.
Similar to how Newark airport’s code is EWR (since all N’s are taken by the Navy).
MB is already taken for Manitoba. OK, so that’s in Canada, but I think they’ve already changed one abbreviation because of a conflict with a Canadian province.
When the state abbrevs were first assigned, Nebraska was given NB. It was soon changed to NE. I don’t know for sure, but I think this was because NB was already established as the abbrev for New Brunswick.
As far as the Colorado/Idaho thing, the original proposal was for a territory named Jefferson in that region. But Congress at the time was controlled by Republicans, so that name didn’t last long. A whole bunch of other names were suggested, and finally Idaho became favored. But at the last minute, the delegate from the territory figured out that Idaho doesn’t mean anything[sup]1[/sup], so got it changed to Colorado.
The funny thing was that at the time, the Colorado River didn’t even flow through the new territory. They subsequently renamed one of its tributaries so that at least part of the river was in it.
[sup]1[/sup] As best anyone can tell, the name Idaho was coined as a faux Indian term. It certainly doesn’t mean “gem of the mountain” as is frequently claimed. The Indians didn’t even have gems, so they probably didn’t have a word for them.
When did the state abbreviations happen? I had a penpal from California for a while when I was in primary school and I know I used to put ‘Calif’ in her address, not CA.
This is just one reason (well, perhaps two reasons) why Australia will never become part of the US:
Firstly, the Australia Post code for Western Australia is the same as the USPO code for Washington State – WA.
Secondly, 5 states and territories of Australia have 3-letter codes: ACT, NSW, QLD, TAS and VIC.
Just to throw another monkey wrench into the discussion, here is a scenario that could possibly happen sometime in the future.
What if Washington, DC were to be admitted as the 50th state? What would we call it, and what would the abbreviation be?
We already have a state called Washington. The new state would no longer be the District of Columbia. Would it become the State of Columbia? In that case, we couldn’t use CO or CA. Maybe CL or CM. Or would we keep the DC abrreviation?
51st state :smack: :smack: :smack:
Well, my vote is for M2, or M^2 (can’t figure out how to print exponents). Then Madenosit could claim to be the most “extreme” state in the Union.
If it were admitted, it would probably end up being the State of Columbia, with Washington as its only municipality. (Remember, there used to be other cities in DC when it was bigger, like Georgetown.) That leaves lots of possibilites, CL, CU, CM, CB, etc.
{sub} and {/sub}, with [ brackets instead of {.
As fair as I know, the two letter abbreviations* are a purely postal custom. I don’t knwo when they were introduced, but I believe it can’t be too long time ago. I got a 1950s world almanac from my father which he had had as a child, and it included abbreviations for the states of the U.S., and they were all in that style: Mass. for Massachusetts, Col. for Colorado, Fla. for Florida and so on. I’d think the two letter codes were introduced together with the ZIP code system.
I’ve always found that those two letter codes for states were really cool. I know of magazines and newspapers in Germany which tried to introduce codes for the 16 states in Germany, but they never caught on, possibly because it has never been common here to distinguish cities of the same name by adding the state they’re in (instead, we use geographical denominators, such as rivers). But we’d quickly have similar collisions: 5 of the 16 states start with B.
*): What’s cooler than abbreviating “abbreviation” to “abbrev”?