1600 Penn Ave

I've noticed some british people put a comma after the number in addresses. Is it an old fashioned thing?

It is against modern addressing style, which is to just put commas at the end of lines - or leave out all commas as they confuse the computers.

An important point svealander.

Why is the street number so high?

I don't know. Not all streets start at #1 and go on in successive order, though -- often they skip a lot of numbers, or go to a new set (100's, 200's) after each intersection rather than go in strict one-after-another order.

In the US, street numbers are usually assigned by area, rather than by the order in which houses were built, which is the case in some other places. So often numbers that are skipped initially may come into use later when newer houses are built between existing sites. So I think numbers are assigned to various plots of land whether or not anyone actually builds on them.

There is also the possibility of the later subdivision of existing plots to take into account -- if I currently own an acre of land, I might be allowed to sell off say, quarter-acre parcels of it later on, and those parcels would all need their own numbers at that point. So that's why my next-door neighbor today might not have a street number exactly one higher or lower than mine.

<<Why is the street number so high? .>>

Because maybe it is a long road?

I am use to the strict one-after-another order. Seems like a crazy system in the USA.

The steet numbering system is OK.

What's the highest number in Penn Ave?

It is actually 1600 Penn Ave, also known as the White House. Hope thiisa hrelps.

Talking about house numbering the system here in the UK is nothing like the American version where it sems that the streets/roads appear to be horrendously long going by the large numbers involved....eg 5677 Sycamore Drive, but thanks to our American frinds in this forum we can now see how that works out.

Here in the UK the house numbers are based solely on the actual numbers of dwellings in each street/road....eg 26 Gleneagles Avenue, or whatever, with odd numbers on one side of the street/road and evens on the other. That's the usual format. There is nothing to prevent residents giving names to their houses in addition to the numbers, so No 26 as above could also be called Utopia or Hellonearth , or whatever. This surely assists the postal delivery staff in their job to deliver the correct mail to the right property. There is a house not far from where I live called Ikostalott.

As with most things in life it doesn't always work out that way, and you occasionally come across a house that has neither a number or a name, which must please the post(wo)man no end! Very, very occasionally you come across a house that doesn't even have a letter box, so what the poor benighted post(wo)man does then is anyone's guess.....most probably props the mail up against the front door or goes round the back, looking out for any belligerent canine with bared teeth, and does the same there.

I became aware of the pitfalls involved in mail delivery when I found myself delivering charity leaflets to registered donors when I was still at school, the area involved being in my own home district of Edinburgh here, in a part of the suburb containing mostly older properties, many of which were detached and quite isolated. That's when I found out about the houses with neither a name nor a number....a nightmare surely for the postal people.

However, everything is automatically sorted by postal code systems anyway, so long as the sender of the mail states the correct postcode in the address, which in the UK can locate and identify very small groups of individual properties, as few as four or five, or even an actual property, so well defined is the system. Take the postal code EH9 9YZ. Edinburgh has been assigned the EH postal letters, and EH9, for example, further indicates which area of the city area that particular code covers. The 9 in the second part narrows it down even more closely to a smaller section of the area, the Y even more localised, and the Z (zed!) to a certain group of properties, no more than about 5 or 6 at the most. So a person sending a letter addressed to Mr Ben Dover at 56 Shamrock Grove in the EH9 9YZ postal district could simply write on the envelope.....

BD
56
EH9 9YZ


.....and then post it in Southampton or Moreton-in-the March or Wyre Piddle or Ballachulish or Llantwit Major (yes, there really IS a place in Wales by that name!) or anywhere else in the UK and it will (or should under normal circumstances, be delivered to the correct property - the next day if it has a first class stamp affixed.

We have a similar postal code system in the US. While the normal 5-digit zip code (zip stands for Zone Improvement Plan, I believe) codes for a section of town -- my city has 5 or 6 zip codes in it -- the newer zip-plus-four (a 9-digit code) pinpoints each unique address. So you could technically just put the zip plus four on your package and it would get to where it was going.

We don't use letters as part of our postal codes in the US but it makes a lot of sense to do so, as there are 26 letters but only 10 single digits, and this affords you a lot more variation per character.