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Address (geography)

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

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. 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 and even numbers up the other, although there is significant variation on this basic pattern. Cities in North America, particularly those planned on grids, often incorporate block numbers, quadrants and cardinal directions into their street numbers. Detroit and its suburbs have long addresses. Japanese cities usually number buildings by block and neighbourhood (chome) rather than street; as a result most Japanese streets are unnamed.

Street names may follow a variety of themes. In new developments, streets may all follow the same theme (e.g. bird species), or start with the same letter. Streets in Europe and Latin America are often named for auspicious dates. In many North American cities, such as Manhattan and Edmonton, Alberta, streets are simply numbered sequentially across the street grid.

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.

See Also

• Japanese addressing system