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Concept
Address
Summary
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 and organization name. Some addresses also contain special codes, such as a postal code, to make identification easier and aid in the routing of mail.
Addresses provide a means of physically locating a building. They are used in identifying buildings as the end points of a postal system and as parameters in statistics collection, especially in census-taking and the insurance industry. Address formats are different in different places, and unlike latitude and longitude coordinates, there is no simple mapping from an address to a location.
Until the 18th and 19th centuries, most houses and buildings were not numbered.
Street naming and numbering began under the age of Enlightenment, also as part of campaigns for census and military conscription, such as in the dominions of Maria Theresa in the mid 18th century.
Numbering allowed the efficient delivery of mail, as the postal system evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries to reach widespread usage.
Comprehensive addressing of all buildings is still incomplete, even in developed countries. For example, the Navajo Nation in the United States was still assigning rural addresses as of 2015 and the lack of addresses can be used for voter disenfranchisement in the USA. In many cities in Asia, most minor streets were never named, and this is still the case today in much of Japan. A third of houses in Ireland lacked unique numbers until the introduction of Eircode in 2014.
House numbering
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.
Official source
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