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Mailing address


An address is a collection of information, presented in a mostly fixed format, used to give the location of a building, apartment, or other structure or a plot of land, generally using political boundaries and street names as references, along with other identifiers such as house or apartment numbers. Some addresses also contain special codes, such as a postal code, to make identification easier and aid in the routing of mail.

Addresses have several functions:

Addresses may have drawbacks:

Until the advent of modern postal systems around the 18th and 19th centuries, most houses and buildings were not numbered. Streets may have been named for landmarks, such as a city gate or market, or for the occupations of their inhabitants. In many cities in Asia, most minor streets were never named. This is still the case today in much of Japan. A local postman would be familiar with the area and thus able to deliver mail, but as postal systems developed, it became necessary to number buildings to aid in mail delivery.

Comprehensive addressing of all buildings is still not complete, even in developed countries. For example, the Navajo Nation in the United States was still assigning rural addresses as of 2015. A third of houses in Ireland lacked unique numbers until the introduction of Eircode in 2014.

In most English-speaking countries, the usual method of house numbering is an alternating numbering scheme progressing in each direction along a street, with odd numbers on one side (often west or south or the left-hand side leading away from a main road) and even numbers on the other side, although there is significant variation on this basic pattern. Many older towns and cities in the UK have "up and down" numbering where the numbers progress sequentially along one side of the road, and then sequentially back down the other side. 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.


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