Get Iso Tr 20461

In the early days of the U.S. Postal Service, mailing addresses weren't regulated. You might have used the recipient's street address along with the city and state, but you wouldn't have seen a ZIP code. Mail was hand-sorted, and delivery relied on local knowledge of its intended destination.

The ZIP in ZIP Code stands for Zone Improvement Plan, and it was introduced July 1, 1963, as part of a larger Postal Service Nationwide Improved Mail Service (NIMS) plan to improve the speed of mail delivery.

[2] The first three digits of the ZIP code were invented by Robert A. Moon, who came up with a system for dividing the country into approximately 900 geographical areas. Eventually, H. Bentley Hahn contributed the fourth and fifth digits, which added further precision to geographic locales.

The most complete ZIP Code is a nine-digit number consisting of five digits, a hyphen, and four digits, which the USPS describes by its trademark ZIP+4. The correct format for a numeric ZIP+4 code is five digits, a hyphen, and four digits.

The ZIP code 00001 is one of more than 42,000 five-digit ZIP Codes in the United States. ZIP area 00001 is located in the Dillingham Census Area, state of Alaska.

The code became a tool for organizing and displaying demographic information while also allowing for the efficient sorting and dispatching of mail. Over the span of 50 years, the ZIP Code was expanded from 5 digits to 9 and then to 11, with each digit indicative of the address location.

ZIP Codes are numbered with the first digit representing a certain group of U.S. states, the second and third digits together representing a region in that group (or perhaps a large city) and the fourth and fifth digits representing a group of delivery addresses within that region.