Everyone knows their address, but it’s a fact that many people experience anxiety when asked to enter that address into a form or write it on an envelope. Get full Address Line 1 And Address Line 2 Definitions
What should be a simple matter of putting in a street name, a street number and possibly apartment or suite number becomes unnecessarily complicated by arcane terms like “address line 1” and requirements that you split your address into a number of separate pieces.
Although the terminology used by forms and postal services can be confusing, entering your address is actually fairly easy.
In this post, we’ll take a look at the parts of an address and clear up this mystifying mess.
Before we start, it’s worth noting that addresses are formulated differently around the world.
In the interest of clarity, any description below applies to addresses in the United States of America.
What should you put in “Address Line 1”?
In short, “address line 1” is just the first part of your address. When you write an address formally, you split the various parts of it onto several lines to make mail delivery easier and improve legibility.
Any time you are asked for the first line of your address, you simply need to put in the number of your building and the name of the street where you live.
Other information, such as apartment number, goes elsewhere, so you don’t need to worry about it here.
The parts of an address
Although even young children can recite their address, the address system we use today is the end result of close to five hundred years of evolution. In the United States, formal efforts to normalize addresses began in the late 1800s and today are nearly complete.
The history is interesting but unnecessary if all you want to do is understand how to report your address.
Address Line 1
The most important thing about your address is your building number and street name.
If you think about it from the perspective of someone delivering mail, this makes perfect sense. Before you worry about how to find the specific apartment someone lives in, or which department they work for, you need to make sure you’re at least on the right street.
Likewise, if you were giving a friend directions to your apartment on the phone, you wouldn’t just say, “It’s apartment 2b.” First, you need to provide directions to your specific street and inform your friend which building in the apartment complex is yours.
Address line 1, then, can be seen as a kind of preview of the full address. Simply write or type the street number of your building or house, leave a space, and then finish off the line with your street name. You shouldn’t add a comma along with either of the items in address line 1.
Building Number
Your building number is a number assigned to each house, apartment building, office or other type of building to help people tell which is which.
If you aren’t sure what your building number is, try checking somewhere on the side of the building.
As a general rule, building numbers are typically painted or attached to the buildings they represent. Other common places for building numbers are the curb at the edge of the street or the mailbox.
No matter where your number is located, it should be visible from the road.
When you are typing or writing the building number as part of address line 1, make sure you are using roman numerals instead of spelling out each number as a word.
That is, if your house number is 326 you should write down 326 instead of three-hundred and twenty-six.
Address Line 1: How To Fill in Forms
Address Line 1: How To Fill in Forms
Some building numbers are hyphenated, but this is uncommon. If your number does have a hyphen, be sure to include it when filling out a form or addressing an envelope. The number 32-684 is very different from the number 32684!
Street Number
The street name is another easy-to-understand part of your address. Much like how we tell buildings apart by their numbers, it has long been common practice to name streets.
You most likely already know the name of the street where you live, but if you aren’t sure you can walk to the nearest intersection and check the name listed on the street sign there.
Street signs typically list both names, so make sure you are writing down the street name that faces you when you are standing on your own street.
Some street names are a single word, while others may contain several. If you have a street name with multiple words, you should capitalize each, as street names are proper nouns. That is, the name “Doaks Ferry Road” is “Doaks Ferry” and not “Doaks ferry.”
Road, RD or Rd?
One part of a street name that can be a little confusing is how to abbreviate the word that follows the name of your street. This part of address line 1 is called a “street suffix.”
There are literally hundreds of different street suffixes. You might wonder why there are so many words for the type of street.
Like a house number and a street name, suffixes help with clarity. In this case, you can use a suffix to tell two streets with similar names apart.
There are lots of suffixes, and lots of ways to abbreviate them. Square can be abbreviated as Sq or Sqr, while highway might appear as Highwy, Hwy or Hway, just to name a few. Other suffixes, like lane, only have a single abbreviation, Ln……
