Today, we’re going to start with rules but go heavy on history at the end because what I thought would be an easy question to answer took me down an interesting rabbit hole and finally to an interview. It all started with this voicemail message.
"Hi, Grammar Girl. l I ... I actually work for the Federal Government, and I have a good enough command of writing and grammar that I am humorously referred to as the Grammar Guru. Recently we were writing a report and something came up. Some of the people on the committee thought we should capitalize 'ZIP Code' . . . and my take on that is that would be correct if you are referring to the specific thing — the postal system, that specific system — but if you're talking about 'zip code,' it has become kind of a generic, like kleenex. I don't listen to your podcast, so if you decide to use this, could you please answer it in your column. Thanks very much, Grammar Girl. I remain a faithful reader. Thanks again. Bye bye."
Well, first, you should listen to the podcast, but the answer will be on the website as an article too. It’s extremely rare that material isn’t on both. But thank you for submitting the question as a voicemail so I can use in the podcast!
As I said, I thought this would be a quick answer: I’d look it up in a couple of style guides and bing-bam-boom, the end. But it wasn’t so simple, and I started finding interesting tidbits.
What Are ZIP Codes?
For our international readers, ZIP codes are an American thing. They’re the five digit codes at the very end of a mailing address (and if you want to be really detailed, you can add four more numbers to the end, and in my experience, doing that does help the post office deliver your mail a little faster). Other countries sometimes call the address codes “postal codes,” and some countries don’t have them at all. In the United States, we use just numbers, but some other countries also use letters.
Since our caller works for the U.S. government, and ZIP codes are a government thing, I checked the US Printing Office style guide first. It recommends "ZIP Code."
Associated Press style is similar: “ZIP code”—two words with “ZIP” in all caps—but it uses a lowercase C, and I was surprised it would deviate.
I looked a little deeper, and this made me laugh: Someone asked in the AP Stylebook Q&A section why AP style lowercases the word “code” when the source, the US Postal Service, capitalizes it, and the reply from the AP editors was "The U.S. Postal Service likes capitalization more than we do...
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