The United States Postal Service introduced ZIP codes on this day in 1963. ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan, and theyre designed to make sorting and delivering mail more efficient. The first three digits represent the part of the country the mail is going to, and the last two identify the post office within that region. In 1983, the U.S. Postal Service rolled out ZIP + 4, which added a hyphen and four additional digits to the end of the current ZIP code to speed things up even more. The first two digits of the addendum stand for a specific group of streets or cluster of large buildings, and the last two narrow it down further, specifying one side of the block or even one floor in a large building. ZIP codes start with zero in the Northeast and get bigger as one moves south and west. There are more than 42,000 ZIP codes in the United States.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 22:57:56 +0000
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