When telling somebody in Germany a mailing address in the United States, in which order does one write “United States” and the ZIP code? And, is there anything different about the ZIP code for an overseas writer? Like, for example, how overseas callers have to dial a country code first, is there any prefix?
I’ve always just written letters from foreign countries to the US in the usual US postal format, just appending a “USA” on the bottom. When writing to a foreign country from the US, I follow the country’s local convention and append the country name in all capital letters on the bottom.
As for dialing numbers from Germany to the US, if the person dialing you has a mobile phone, you can usually type + followed by the country code and phone number. The country code for the US is 1, so it’s essentially like dialing a number in the US with a + prepended. So, if you wanted to dial 1-234-567-8910, you’d dial it as +12345678910. If you don’t have a method for making the “+”, you need to type in the “international call/dial out” prefix, which is 00 in Germany, I believe, (as well as in many other countries, but it’s not standard. For example, in the US, you dial 011). So, the above number would be dialed 0012345678910.
ETA: Here’s a list of countries and their dial-out codes. Like I said, if you have a mobile phone, usually dialing “+” will work as the dialing out prefix.
According to the US Postal Service you write the US address just as you would if you were mailing it domestically and write “USA” after the last line of the address. You do not add anything to the zip code. They explicitly say do not put the zip code on the same line as USA and do not underline USA. (No idea why they don’t want you underlining, but they don’t).
In Germany (and actually I was under the impression that this is pretty much standard all over the world) you write the name of the country in the last line of the address:
Jeremy Martinson
455 Larkspur Dr.
San Jose, CA 92926
USA
Perhaps it’s to make it easier for the OCR? The official/standardized formatting rules for the USPS, as I remember them, prefer all-caps, minimal punctuation (no periods for abbreviations, no commas between city and state), and sticking with a set standard of postal abbreviations.
It doesn’t really matter. Include the specific address on the first line, then the country and zip code in whatever order, and it’ll get there, likely with no delay either.
This is the correct example. Do it that way. Always put country last.
As a side note, Bangkok postal codes tend to match New York City ZIP codes – they’re called ZIP codes only in the US, as “ZIP” is an acronym for “Zone Improvement Plan” – and a lot of my mail from the US has gone to NYC. In fact, my American credit-card company was convinced I lived in New York City. When I called asking where my statements were, they said they kept being returned to them. A big part of this confusion occurs from writing the postal code after the country. Then that’s the part of the address that gets zeroed in on, by humans and computers alike.
Country-last is just a specific case of the general rule, that you put the broadest classification at the bottom, and the narrowest at the top. If it were necessary to specify the planet, you’d put that below the country.
Sure, but while I think country-last is pretty much universally understood (probably even standard), the general narrow->broad rule for the rest isn’t quite as standardized. For example, Hungary has NAME, CITY, ADDRESS, POST CODE on each line from top to bottom (or NAME, POSTCODE CITY, ADDRESS).
Of course, it makes sense to put the country name at the bottom, because the local post office you’re sending it from basically just needs to know what country to get it to, and then that country’s local post office can sort out the rest.
Oh, and I just noticed that my initial post that also included info on international dialing was unnecessary. I misread that part of the OP.
AFAIK, this system is also used in a number of other Eastern European countries, for instance Russia. It was also used in Germany until the 1960s. To complicate things even further, there are different ZIP-code systems, different conventions of including the province/state, different patterns for indicating parts of a city, streets, house numbers, apartments etc.
It’s also amazing how many letters that are supposed to be delivered to an address in Austria end up in Australia and vice versa.
The USPS does have one small exception to this, though: apartment numbers. Standard format is something like “123 Fake St., Apt. 4”; in Canada, for example, this would be written “4-123 Fake St.” instead.
This.
I’ve received mail from Canada, the UK, and Australia and all they need to do is put my name, street address, city, state, regular zip code, and “USA” on there and it gets here fine. Some countries might officially require you to put the country name in the local language and/or French (the official language of the Universal Postal Union), but it’ll probably get there without it.
I did notice that some people in the UK have a habit of sending mail to the US using a UK-inspired layout, but it gets here fine. E.g. they will do something like:
Jeremy Martinson
455 Larkspur Dr.
San Jose
CA 92926
USA
The guys at the post office aren’t brain dead slobs, they can figure that out.
And all you really need is the zip code. The state and city information is encoded in that, but it does make for a good error-check. I’ve once, for fun, just sent a letter to NAME, ADDRESS, ZIPCODE and it got there fine (although I probably annoyed someone along the way, so I haven’t done it since.)
I’ve heard anecdotal stories of letters from the US addressed to “<address> UK” being directed to the Ukraine rather than the United Kingdom because the USPS officially treats “UK” as an abbreviation for the Ukraine and wants you to write “United Kingdom”, “Great Britain”, or “GB” for limey mail.
I’ve also heard that the US and Canada have intentionally set up their state, territory, and province codes so that none of them overlap. The intent being, of course, that someone could post a letter in Canada to “Minneapolis, MN”, forgetting to specify the country, and the letter wouldn’t end up in the lap of some Canada Post clerk in Manitoba wondering where this funny-ass place called Minneapolis is.
In general, the post offices of various countries will do whatever they can to get a letter to the intended recipient, and will sometimes go to extreme lengths to figure out who the intended recipient is. One example I’ve heard of is a letter addressed simply to “Mother Theresa, India”, which was delivered.
Of course, you’ll probably annoy people a lot by addressing in nonstandard ways, and it’ll take longer for your mail to get there, so don’t do it.
John Smith
335 East Street #56
Podunk, Kansas Zone SD443
Western Hemisphere Directorate
Occupied Earth
Cardassian-Klingon Alliance
Milky Way Galaxy
Local Group
Mirror Universe
I accidentally your whole country!
Listen, punk, we didn’t lick the Nazis in '45 just so you could *give *a United States to Germany!
There are also the stunts where people have allegedly had mail delivered to Playboy magazine with only the bunny logo as an address, or to Mad with only a picture of Alfred E. Neuman.