The Hidden Pattern in Post Codes

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38 thoughts on “The Hidden Pattern in Post Codes”

  7. When mailing internationally… you probably should include the country. ON THE LAST LINE, below the postal code. Because the US sorters may not know a Canada post code from one in England. If the address ends 'Ontario, CA M5G 1X6', country before the postal code, your package will go on a trip to Ontario California.
    Same applies to mailing things to the US, the country one line down from the zip – otherwise the sorters may wig out and ship our international mail back to Japan or wherever it came from.
    Cheers.

    Reply

  16. Very interesting!
    I wonder if there's any other large outliers in postcodes.

    In Sweden, if you look up "postnummer" from PostNord's website, they'll actually give you a 12 page pdf explaining how our postal code system works! (Didn't know that before watching this video and being curious.)

    We have a five digit system where the first two digits will point to an area in Sweden. It goes up clockwise, starting at 1 in Stockholm, going south it uses 2 in Malmo, then heads northwest up to Gothenburg that starts with 4, and eventually goes up to 9 in the north.
    The second digit will narrow down the area, while also indicating if the address is a street address, postal box, or large customer.

    There then seems to be a bunch of exceptions and special rules depending on the preceding digit for position 3-5.

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  17. Postcode went a bit complicated in Germany after reunification, Imagine a country almost doubling in size. To keep most of the old numbering system they basically just added another number in front.

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  19. Fun Fact: In Germany, from 1990 onwards, there was a four-digit postcode system. There was a problem: the postcodes often overlapped, for example 2300 was used for Stralsund and Kiel. There was a way to get around this: W (west) and O (east) were written in front of the number. That means O-2300 for Stralsund and W-2300 for Kiel. From October 24, 1991, the board of the German Federal Postal Service (today: Deutsche Post AG, or DHL Group for short) decided on a completely new five-digit system.

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  21. During ireland explanation, you passed by, an hair away, justifying the use of W3W as destination address. It may not suffice for large buildings with more than 4 families under the same roof, but it would work for most other cases.

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  31. This inspired me to check the map of ZIP codes, which reminded me that there are a few single buildings in Manhattan which have their own 5-digit ZIP code, like 10112 (30 Rockefeller Plaza, where SNL is filmed). What I found most fascinating was that none the four largest buildings in Manhattan by square footage (55 Water Street, MetLife, 1WTC, and 111 8th Avenue) have their own five digit ZIP code.

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  32. Back in Germany now, but I liked my UK postcode. Never forgot it once: M8 8BS. Mate ate … bullshirt. πŸ˜€

    And yeah, was basically just one "road", so just the code and my house number would have sufficed.
    There was also no name on my door/doorbell/postbox (which is the door, coz … UK). So you could have written to Ehel at XX M88BS. o/
    Also meant post from former residents would still be delivered …

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  35. What Grey didn't expand on is that before adopting Eircode in 2015, Ireland didn't really HAVE post codes. So they took a system that sometimes relied on individually named houses in the address (yes, some houses had names instead of street numbers – and I guess some probably still do) and leapfrogged the rest of the world by adopting a 21st century solution. Good job Ireland!

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  36. Mailman (city letter carrier) here, the "new" last 4 on the zip code are useless or more specifically obsolete, they became obsolete when we changed to the DPS (delivery point sequence) system, basically every address on a route has a delivery number, before that the last 4 helped narrow down a neighborhood, apartment complex, or other high volume mail area that extra sorting might help. But with DPS, the auto-sorting machines, and spraying of IMB (Intelligent Mail barcode) on every letter, the ZIP+4 has no purpose and if you look at the Zip+4 lists now, you can see something of time capsule of how routes used to be as the +4 was never updated to reflect route adjustments.

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  38. Back in the late 90's-early 00's when we still got video game demos on disc, there were often early game developer websites you could sign up to get free ones sent to you in the mail. They only let you order one per address, but I figured out that you could very lightly tweak or misspell things and the form thought it was a different address. Some of these demos I could resell for a few bucks so I set out to experiment and see out how much I could change my own address and still get the disc successfully. Turns out I could absolutely butcher the street, city, and state and even the house number sometimes and still get it to show up, but if any part of the zip was wrong, game over! Those never arrived

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