Why put Americans use state prefixes in front of zip codes?

Factual Questions
21

Just to reiterate what you’ve been told, it is not a “prefix.”

It is parsed as:

[[Austin, Texas]] [[78711]]

not as

[[Austin,]] [[Texas 78711]]

American cities have “official” names that are rarely used except on documents referring to the municipal government, so the official name of Austin is probably something like the “City of Austin.”

However, because of the way cities have historically been named and because of the American political system, unless it is apparent that you’re talking about the Austin that is in Texas, e.g., you are in Texas and it’s clear that you’re talking about places in Texas, it is usual to specify “Austin, Texas.” Except for maybe 20 or so “famous” cities, it is rare for the state to be left out.

For example, when people ask me my home town, I say “Dayton, Ohio,” not just “Dayton,” unless there’s already a reason for them to know that I’m talking about a place in Ohio.

So in a sense, the real name of any American city (as opposed to the official name) takes the form “[city name], [state name].”

And it is not mandatory that you use the two-letter abbreviation. I always write the name of the state out in full.

If you leave off the Zip Code, the Postal Service will still deliver the letter if they are able to, but I’m sure that slows things down somewhat.

Theoretically, you shouldn’t have to give the name of the city at all – the Zip Code should be enough.

So in a sense it’s a relict, but as others have said, it helps the people who are delivering mail to keep track of things. And it also helps the sender and the receiver out. We humans prefer names to numbers. It helps us persuade ourselves that we don’t live in Airstrip One.

22

It’s a whole big jumble, agreed. Partly because there’s no single way in which the country is chopped up into sections, and also because those sections in some cases give too little information, and some too much. Name, number and street I presume are all obvious. Beyond that, there’s the locality. In some cases, this just needs to be the town (remember that ‘town’ is somewhat equivalent to ‘small American city’). In other cases, a better (i.e. more localised) description is necessary - for example, I used to live in Platt Lane, Manchester. Nobody failed to know where it was, because it was the only one by that name (and also a stand of a football ground was named after it, but that’s an exceptional case). However, there’s over a dozen different 'Stockport Road’s in Manchester, so it would be sensible to put ‘Stockport Road, Denton, Manchester’. Theoretically, the postcode would get it to the right place without this, but it helps prevent errors.

After the locality, some rural areas have a ‘post town’, which is the nearby place where the final mail sorting is done. After that, there’s the county. Although not all places are in counties any longer…told you it was a jumble. Again, the letter would probably get there fine without the county, but if the postcode is wrong, the county will be enough for the letter to be placed in the right sack without any delay. And there’s plenty of other eccentricities - such as when one small road is tucked away off of another, both will be put on the address.

Re. postcodes themselves - the first half gives the broad geographic area (G = Glasgow, IP = Ipswich, etc), followed by a number which is a broad subdivision. The second part subdivides this again, and then pinpoints the address to a few specific houses, or one large location such as an office building. And the final exception, for the initial geographic identifier, is London, which gives compass-point-based divisions instead (SW = south-west London, EC - east central).

I hope that makes some sense. Possibly.

23

S’funny. I recently used that site to “fix” all the addresses in my client’s HR/Payroll DB for W2 printing.

24

There’s a lot of things that a lot of people would like you to do, but I don’t hodl with obsessive standardization. Dispensing with the two-letter abbreviations won’t interfere with the delivery of the mail so I ignore that “rule.”

Besides, why even have state names at all if all you ever see are the abbreviations? Why not just number them from 001 to 050?

25

…and just to examine the example provided…

Pillory Close is probably a small road (possibly a private road), off a larger one called Diddling (I know we have some strange placenames, but that’s pushing it. Unless you meant Didlington, in Dorset :stuck_out_tongue: )

Doperham is probably a small village, the nearby large location of Swallow-on-Cleese being the post town. Not sure how St Nigel got in there - that’s over fifty miles away :wink:

To be correct, the postcode goes after the county

26

Gorilla Man, does it make any sense to specify “England,” “Scotland,” or “Wales” at the end?

27

Not really, no. The county or city will make it clear.

28

Here’s a postal code question for Schnitte.

I was an exchange student in Germany a long time ago, and I noticed that there you usually wrote a four digit city code, the city name, and then perhaps a district code. For smallish cities, like Goettingen where I was, you’d just write “3400 Goettingen”. But for a larger city it’d be something like, 2000 Berlin 23. At least that’s how I think it worked. Could you explain the details?

Also, when was the postal code system implemented? Does it carry over from the early 20th century, or before? If so, does the Bundespost still maintain the lists of city codes for places that are no longer in Germany, like Breslau? If I were in Germany and wanted to write to someone who lives in Breslau, could I write the old German code for Breslau, and the name ‘Breslau’ on the envelope, or would I have to write ‘Wroclau’?

29

Danke for the answers! I knew what “Munchen” meant and all but I never realized that of course the -land names would be in German too! :smack:

Business addresses in Singapore, India, and other Brit-influenced countries will often have “___ House” as the second line after the company name too, I’ve noticed. I always think of some grand largish cottage down a palm-lined avenue when it’s probably some depressing block-y building like in ‘The Office’.

30

That reminds me…in the same show I hear the term ‘trading estate’…I guess that must be like what we’d call a ‘business park’ in the U.S.

As for those second-line embellishments in the address, we don’t see it much in the U.S., but there are a few examples. The University of Southern California likes to put “University Park” as the second or third line of its address. University Park is just a quaint name for the campus, which is actually in the Los Angeles city limits.

caveman, my paleoanthropological friend and Stone Age compadre, I’m sure you’re correct. Beverly Hills 90210 has got to have more than 10000 separate houses. On the other hand, apartment buildings usually seem to get their own four-digit code, and large office buildings may get several.

31

It’s standardization, but it’s not obsessive. If you use the postal standard state abbreviation (two capital letters, no periods) and have halfway decent handwriting your letter will probably be machine-sortable. What your brave iconclasm does is force a hand-sort.

Sure, it’ll get there, but you are interfering with the delivery unnecessarily.

32

Just another comment about the U.S. Postal Service being pretty good at figuring out where something is supposed to go.

When I moved here, we were given a choice: A post office box in the nearest town (about 2 miles away), or street delivery with a “rural route” address from a town about 10 miles away. Since my driveway is 1/4 mile long, I opted for the PO Box. No sense leaving my mail sitting out on the highway!

A few months after I moved in, a local sent me a letter. He addressed it to my name, “Rural Route” (no number) in the other town. So out of all the address elements, the only things that were correct were my name and the state. I still got the letter in two days.

I love rural America!

33

Just for the record, addresses in Germany don’t use the state. I live in Rheinland-Pfalz, but it’s nowhere on my address.

Example:

Jman
Examplestr. 12
67735 Mehlbach

That’s it. No state, just postal code and city. Format is street name, number on the first line, then postal code (Postleitzahl), city name.

34

I have 2 different friends in England whose house names go on their mail! After writing one of them for years, I never knew what that “Avalon” meant until I finally visited them in Kent. There was a sign next to the door that said Avalon. I like that the postal workers will know you by your house’s name rather than just a number. Another friend’s house name is Moonviews. I saw a name by the door in the movie Millions too. Is it still common or going out of style?

Because it’s easier to remember that Illinois is IL than 36 or whatever. I live here and I don’t even know what number is it (that is, in the lineup of states). I’d be looking up numbers all the time. What a nightmare.

35

I’m sorry, but I’ll keep doing things my way. If an automatic sorter can read street names and city names, it could just as well be programmed to read full state names.

36

I never heard “trading estate,” but “Something House” is usually the name of an office building. In the US, we usually don’t put individual building names in addresses, except for building letters or numbers in apartment and condominium complexes, college campuses, and high-profile buildings that smehow got their own address (usually something like “1 Enterprise Center” or something similar in place of a real address like “46 Krumpf Street”)

I guess the British addressing system is far less formal than the US system, incorporating as many or as few geographic features as the addresser wants to narrow down a location. If we lost the Revolutionary War, would my (really old) address look something like this?

Elmwood Doper
666 Majestic Ridge (the address number and street)
Paddington Estate (the quaint name I would give to my property)
Majestic Hills (the subdivision name)
Telshor Hills (the neighborhood name)
Crosses-on-Grand (the city name, Anglicized and made more British-sounding)
Lady Ann (the county name, Anglicized)
CYU L8R

37

The two letter state code may be redundant when considered with zip codes. It is a way to get a handle on where it is going if you can’t remember 99,999 zip codes and the associated cities!

I worked for the Chicago Railway Terminal Post Office for two Christmas seasons, long prior to the invention of zip codes. As a RyPO employee my father knew every post office and mail routing for 9 or ten states! Today some USPO employees apparrently can’t route mail with a 5 digit zip code!

In those days all mail was hand sorted in a “Primary” case or cluster of pigeon hole boxes to states and major cities and “Residue.” The mail in each pigeon hole was then sorted in a 'Secondary" case to cities, towns, and Residue which took care of all the left overs. Residue was sorted and routed by experts who knew, as my dad did, how to route it for quickest delivery.

An Explanation of The Digits in US Zip Codes

38

I’m all for individuality. The world would be a horribly dull place if everyone were the same. You just picked a dumb place to express yours.

The fact is the preferred format isn’t for the Post Office’s benefit, it’s for yours. It’s not because they want you to march in lockstep like some mindless drone. It makes sorting and delivery much more efficient and helps them deliver your mail in a timely fashion. You’re unnecessarily making it more difficult, which doesn’t seem smart. All you’re accomplishing is making a pain in the ass of yourself.

I’m not even going to touch the “programming the machines to read full state names” thing.

39

Have you ever run into European software that doesn’t let you enter a province name?

I occasionally deal with an oinline store in Belgium that assumes my address is something like:

Sunspace
Apartment 201
Stephen Drive 1
M6B 3Y6 Toronto
Canada

Things are in the European order, and there is no place to put the province name at all. No so bad when we’re dealing with Toronto, perhaps, but all those small towns named after British places, where there is more than one with the same name in different provinces or states?

40

Not true. The ZIP+4 of the home I grew up in covers all five of the single-family homes on one side of the block.