address

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An address is a code and abstract concept expressing the fixed location of a home, business or other building on the earth's surface.

Functions

Addresses have several functions:

1. Providing a means of physically locating a building, especially in a city where there are many buildings and streets,
2. Identifying buildings as the end points of a postal system,
3. A social function: someone's address can have a profound effect on their social standing,
4. As parameters in statistics collection, especially in census-taking or the insurance industry.

History

Until the advent of modern postal systems, most houses and buildings were not numbered. Streets may have been named for landmarks, such as a city gate or market, or for the professions of their inhabitants. In many cities in Asia, most minor streets were never named. This is still the case today in much of Japan. When postal systems were introduced, it became necessary to number buildings to aid in mail delivery.

Current addressing schemes

House numbering or naming

Main article: House numbering

In most English-speaking countries the standard has become an alternating numbering scheme progressing in one direction up a street, with odd numbers running up one side (usually west or south) and even numbers up the other (usually north or east), although there is significant variation on this basic pattern. Cities in North America, particularly those planned on a grid plan, often incorporate block numbers, quadrants (explained below), and cardinal directions into their street numbers, so that in many such cities, addresses roughly follow a Cartesian coordinate system. Some other cities around the world have their own schemes.

Although house numbering is the principal identification scheme in the British Isles, it is also common for houses there to be identified by name, rather than number, especially in small towns. In these cases, the street name will usually follow the house name. A fictional example of such an address might read: "Smith Cottage, Frog Lane, Barchester, Barsetshire, BA9 9BA".

Quadrants

In cities with Cartesian-coordinate-based addressing systems, the streets that form the north-south and east-west dividing lines constitute the x and y axes of a Cartesian coordinate plane and thus divide the city into quadrants. The quadrants are typically identified in the street names, although the manner of doing so varies from city to city. For example, in one city, all streets in the northeast quadrant may have "NE" prefixed or suffixed to their street names, while in another, the intersection of North Calvert Street and East 27th Street can only be in the northeast quadrant.

Street-naming conventions

Street names may follow a variety of themes. In many North American cities, such as Manhattan and Edmonton, Alberta, streets are simply numbered sequentially across the street grid. Washington, D.C. uses a numbered streets running north-south and lettered or alphabetically named streets running east-west, while diagonal avenues are typically named after states. In Salt Lake City, and many other Utah cities, streets are in a large grid and are numbered in increments of 100 based on their location relative to the center of the city in blocks, usually at Main St. and Center St. (for example, 100 South would be one block south of the city center, while 130 West would be 1.3 blocks west.) In Salt Lake City, the streets are based off of the Salt Lake Temple. In new housing developments in North America, streets may all follow the same theme (e.g. bird species), or start with the same letter. Streets in Continental Europe and Latin America are usually named after famous people or auspicious dates.

Postal codes

Postal codes are a relatively recent development in addressing, designed to speed the sorting and processing of mail by assigning unique numeric or alphanumeric codes to each geographical locality.

Postal alternatives to physical addresses

For privacy and other purposes, postal services have made it possible to receive mail without revealing one's physical address or even having a fixed physical address. Examples are post office boxes and poste restante (general delivery).

Address format

Main article: Mailing address format by country

In most of the world, addresses are written in order from most specific to general information, starting with the addressee and ending with the largest geographical unit. For example:

Miss S Pollard
1 Chapel Hill
Heswall
BOURNEMOUTH
BH1 1AA[1]

In English-speaking countries, the postal code usually comes last. In much of Europe, the country code and postal code precede the town name, thus: "CH-1010 Lausanne".

If a house number is provided, it is written on the same line as the street name; a house name is written on the previous line. When addresses are written inline, line breaks are replaced by commas. Conventions on the placing of house numbers differ: either before or after the street name. Similarly, there are differences in the placement of postal codes: in the UK, they are written on a separate line at the end of the address; in the United States and Canada, they often appear immediately after the state or province, on the same line; in Austria, Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands they appear before the city, on the same line.

The Japanese addressing system uses the opposite ordering, starting with the town and ending with the addressee, except when using the Latin alphabet. The Hungarian system also goes from large to small units, except the name of the addressee is put into the first line.

Geographical address conventions in the media

This section has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page.

People may be said generally to get used to the form of geographical address used in their home location. However, this can cause confusion when people naturally extend their written generalisations from nationally used conventions to media where the audience is global.

This can be observed most frequently with internet usage, and in films where a scene opens with the location listed on screen.

For example, it can be guessed that someone writing "Birmingham, AL" the following would live in a member state of the United States of America. It is common in the US to include state codes in addresses, but these are often meaningless to persons outside North America who are not accustomed to the US address format. In addition, the writer in this example has assumed that others would not only understand from the use of a state code that their city of Birmingham is in the state of Alabama, but also that their city is in the USA. Another example of this phenomenon of US address forms being exported to a global audience is with Google Earth. This service maps "Birmingham" to Birmingham, Alabama rather than Birmingham, England, and "St. Petersburg" to St. Petersburg, Florida rather than the more populous St. Petersburg, Russia.

Of course, the above phenomenon is not limited to the United States. For example, even in media intended for an international audience, it is not uncommon to see a neighborhood in London referred to simply by its London postal district, e.g., W1.

References

1. ^ Addressing your mail: Guidelines, Royal Mail

See also

• Delivery point
• Japanese addressing system
• National Land and Property Gazetteer

External links

• Frank's compulsive guide to postal addresses
• GRC Database Information: links to pages relating to addresses and addressing
• service d'adresse mondial (sedamo) worldwide address service
• Universal Postal Union Postal addressing systems by country

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