1. A Street Name Pre Directional is a word preceding the Street Name that indicates the direction or position of the thoroughfare relative to an arbitrary starting point or line, or the sector where it is located.
2. A Complete Street Name may include a Street Name Pre Directional, a Street Name Post Directional, neither, or both.
3. To avoid confusion, this standard requires that Street Name Pre Directionals be recorded and stored fully spelled out. Abbreviations can cause ambiguity. For example: "N W Jones St": Is it Northwest Jones Street? Ned Walter Jones Street? North Walter Jones Street? For this reason the standard does not recognize abbreviations for Street Name Pre Directionals. If stored unabbreviated, directionals can be exported as abbreviations when needed for special purposes such as mailing labels.
4. For postal addressing, USPS Publication 28 prefers the use of USPS standard abbreviations for Street Name Pre Directionals. USPS Publication 28 sections 233, 294, and Appendix B provide the USPS abbreviations for Street Name Pre Directionals in English and Spanish. USPS standard abbreviations are recognized within the Postal Addressing Profile of this standard.
5. Directional words are often used as or in the Street Name (e.g. North Avenue, West Virginia Avenue). Whether a directional word should be placed in the Street Name Pre Directional or the Street Name cannot always be discerned from the Complete Street Name itself. Sometimes the proper parsing must be inferred from the context of the street name, or checked with the street naming authority. For example, if West Virginia Avenue is named for the state of West Virginia, then "West" is part of the Street Name. However, if at some point the street changes names and become East Virginia Avenue, then perhaps "Virginia" is the Street Name, and "East" and "West" are Street Name Pre Directionals. See Complete Street Name notes for a discussion of this and other cases where a Complete Street Name might be parsed in more than one way.
6. Occasionally two directional words occur together in or before the Street Name (e.g. "East North Avenue", "West South 9th Street", “North West Ridge Road”). Only one of them can be the Street Name Predirectional. The other one might be part of the Street Name, or a Street Name Pre Modifer. See Complete Street Name notes for a discussion of this and other cases where a Complete Street Name might be parsed in more than one way.
7. Local street naming authorities often have rules governing the use of Street Name Pre Directionals in their area of jurisdiction. These rules should be documented in their Address Reference System Street Type Directional And Modifier Rules.
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