Postal code

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A postal code is a series of letters and/or digits appended to a postal address for the purpose of sorting mail.

Germany was the world's first country with a postal code system in the early 1960s. The United States followed a couple of years later.

The majority of the world's national postal services have postal code systems. A few do not: the Republic of Ireland (with the exception of Dublin, though this is more correctly a sorting code and not a postal code), Hong Kong and Panama, for example, do not have postal codes¹, while New Zealand's post code system is only used for the presorting of mail in bulk, not for addressing individual items.

Postal services often have their own distinctive formats and placement rules for postal codes. (Service areas, as a rule, are defined by national borders.) In most English-speaking countries, the postal code goes after the name of the city or town, whereas in most continental European countries it goes before it and is sometimes prefixed with a country code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2).

This is to overcome confusion between postal codes in diferent countries that may be identical, as in Europe, most postal codes are numerical consisting of four or five digits. Following German reunification in 1990, postal codes in the former West Germany were prefixed with the letter 'W', and postal codes in the former East, with 'O' (for 'Ost' or 'East' in German).

Although postal codes are usually assigned to geographical areas, sometimes this is not the case: special codes may be assigned to institutions with large volumes of post, such as government agencies and large commercial companies. One example is the French Cedex system.

1 Alphanumeric postal codes
2 Postal zone numbers
3 See also
4 External links
5 Footnote

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Alphanumeric postal codes

Most postal codes are numeric. The few using alphanumeric postal code systems (with letters and digits) are:

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Postal zone numbers

Before postal codes as described here were used, large cities were often divided into postal zones (or postal districts), usually numbered from 1 up within each city. The newer postal code systems often incorporate the old zone numbers, as with London postal district numbers, for example. Dublin, Ireland still uses postal district numbers, as postal codes are not used in the country at all. (An Post relies on OCR analysis of the entire address instead.) In New Zealand, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch were also subdivided into postal zones, but these have fallen into disuse.

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