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

[Acsenray]

After that, there’s the county. Although not all places are in counties any longer…told you it was a jumble.

I was once told by an Englishman that the correct counties to use in postal addresses are the pre-1970s ones.

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

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

So there’s no possibility of ambiguity, then?

[Tabby_Cat]

Most official mail to my place in London don’t even bother to put in the building number, just the name of the apartment. So it goes like

Tabby_Cat
Litterbox Court < building name
Upper Feline Place <Street name
London
WC1F 9FF

and it generally gets here. That’s what my packges from Singapore are addressed as, too, without the UK… I guess London is plenty famous enough. The postcode is unique to my apartment block, though, and the mail is collected and delivered by the porter, so all you would need to get the mail to me would be my postcode and my flat number. You could try name, but that would rely on the memory of the porter, and although I have an unusal name, it’s probably not reccomended.

As for Singapore, the form goes like this.

Blk 175 #05-09 Upper Serrangoon Road < Apartment block number and flat number
Singapore 199175 < Post code

Generally, the post code references the entire apartment block, and the average block can have up to a hundred apartments. Mail gets delivered to individual mailboxes on the ground floor, so if you don’t have your flat number on the letter, chances are it’s not going to get delivered.

As for the “house” after the company name, well, blame the darn Brits for starting the tradition. Heck, one of the buildings in the LSE is called “Connaught House”, and it’s a miserable narrow high rise building sandwiched between 3 other buildings. And don’t get me started on the BBC’s “BVSH HOVSE”.

[BwanaBob]

@OldGuy

In principle if you put the 9 digit Zip code on an envelope, you shouldn’t require anything else (other than the recipient’s name if that’s important). The 9 digit ZIP indicates a single house or PO Box.

Not exactlt; a ZIP+4 represents a range of addresses: for instance on my street, my ZIP+4 represents a range of 4 addresses.

There’s a ZIP+9 which I believe is accurate down to the individual home/apartment dweller.

[pulykamell]

@ouryL

Cecil Adams
Illinoisstraße 11
60611 Chicagoburg

That one was bugging me, too.

And not all Europeans follow the same system. In the Hungarian manner, the city and postal code comes before the street address, so it’d look like this:

Cecil Adams
Chicago 60611
Illinois utca 11

[GorillaMan]

@acsenray

I was once told by an Englishman that the correct counties to use in postal addresses are the pre-1970s ones.

Well, he didn’t know what he was talking about

Some pre-70s counties would make absolutely no sense to put on an address nowadays (eg. “Manchester, Lancashire” would just look plain odd). They’d be unlikely to result in misdirected mail, but they wouldn’t speed it up, either. However, the pre-70s counties do often get used in some places, partly through force of habit, and partly through snobbery. “Sale, Manchester” doesn’t sound as nice as “Sale, Cheshire”.

So there’s no possibility of ambiguity, then?

No. There’s no duplication of city or county names - and everyone knows that Swansea is in Wales, Dumfries is Scotland, etc. (Well, everybody at the Royal Mail, one would hope.)

[Schnitte]

@Tabby_Cat

As for Singapore, the form goes like this.

Blk 175 #05-09 Upper Serrangoon Road < Apartment block number and flat number
Singapore 199175 < Post code

A country that consits of one single city uses six-digit postal codes? That’s got to be a damn sophisticated scheme there.

[Tabby_Cat]

Weeelllllllllllll…

*  The 6-digit postal code was introduced on 1 September 1995. It allows SingPost to assign a unique postal code to every house and building in Singapore so that the mail sorting system is able to sort mail directly into the sequence of delivery for each postman.
* 6-digit postal code:
  The 6-digit postal code is made up of the sector code and the delivery point. The sector is represented by the first two numbers of the postal code. The remaining four numbers define the delivery point within the sector.
  e.g.
  56 Tanglin Road
  Singapore 247964

24 is the sector code; 7964 is the delivery point, i.e. house or building.

For Housing & Development Board (HDB) residential blocks, the block number is included in the postal code.
e.g.
Blk 335 Smith Street
Singapore 050335

HDB residential blocks with the same number in the same postal sector are differentiated by their postal codes as follows:
e.g.
Blk 110 Simei Street 1
Singapore 520110

Blk 110 Tampines Street 11
Singapore 521110

The postal codes for private residential, commercial and industrial houses and buildings are assigned based on the alphabetical sequence of the street names in each sector. This means that the codes for a particular postal sector have been assigned first to houses and buildings located along street names beginning with 'A, followed by 'B' and so on. The postal codes for such properties do not contain the corresponding house or building numbers included in the postal code. HDB industrial and commercial blocks also use this system. 

Singpost

It’s a pretty big city, y’know… 4 000 000 / 999 999 is about 4. So 4 people share one postal code.

Doesn’t seem too bad for me.

[guizot]

Isn’t it true that addresses in Tokyo are determined by when a building was build, rather than where it is on a block?

[guizot]

“built,” that is

[AWB]

@OldGuy

In principle if you put the 9 digit Zip code on an envelope, you shouldn’t require anything else (other than the recipient’s name if that’s important). The 9 digit ZIP indicates a single house or PO Box. I’m not positive how it works for duplexes or apartments.

buzz wrong!

A 9-digit zip (9DZ) actually represents a range of address on a given street, usually about 10. If you go to your local PO, they’ll have a book for the 9DZs for your state. Looking up, say, Pennsylvania Ave in Upper Marlboro, MD may show:
Pennsylvania Ave
9000-9018 (even) 20772-2001
9001-9019 (odd) 20772-2002
9020-9038 (even) 20772-2003
9021-9039 (odd) 20772-2004

For apartments, 9DZs represent a small group of apartments. But there’s no rhyme nor reason to the grouping that I can see. One apartment building I lived in was listed somewhat like this:
2301 Jefferson Davis Hwy 22202-2000
Apt 201-224 22202-2001
Apt 225-315 22202-2002
Apt 316-507 22202-2003
Apt 508-533 22202-2004

For PO Boxes, the 9DZ may indeed be a 1-to-1 to a specific box number, usually paralleling the number as much as possible. E.g.,
Pepco
PO Box 97274
Washington DC 20090-7274

Use http://www.usps.com to look up your home address’s 9DZ. Then look up your neighbors’ on either side of you. At least one of them should be the same. (Your across-the-street neighbors’ may have different numbers, as odd-even addresses are often separated.)

[AWB]

@OldGuy

In principle if you put the 9 digit Zip code on an envelope, you shouldn’t require anything else (other than the recipient’s name if that’s important). The 9 digit ZIP indicates a single house or PO Box. I’m not positive how it works for duplexes or apartments.

(continued)

E.g. - My 9DZ is 20772-3728. It is also my left and right neighbors’.
Across the street to the left is 20772-3729; to the right is 20772-3746 .

[matt_mcl]

As I understand it, in the Spanish system, you put the postal code, then the city; cities other than provincial capitals are followed by the name of the province (e.g. Lleida or Valladolid; not the autonomous community, e.g. Cataluña or Castilla-León).

So an address in (say) Calatayud would be 12345 CALATAYUD (ZARAGOZA), but an address in Zaragoza would be 12345 ZARAGOZA by itself.

In some cases, though, the name of the capital city isn’t the same as the name of the province (Vitoria/Gasteiz, Alava; Bilbao, Vizcaya; San Sebastián/Donostia, Guipuzcoa; Pamplona, Navarra; Palma de Mallorca, Baleares; Oviedo, Galicia; Logroño, La Rioja; Santander, Cantabria); in others, a city is the capital of the autonomous community but not the province (Santiago de Compostela and Mérida). I’m not sure how it works in those cases, although all of those cities are significant enough that I’m sure the letter would get through even if you didn’t put the province.