Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2022 April 4

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April 4

US State postal abbreviations

KS is Kansas. And KY is Kentucky. If you just started in the middle of the alphabet (and country), this would lead one to think that postal abbreviations are (first letter)(last letter).

That works for Maine (just starting with States that potentially, if you were unaware of American history, were created first given European colonization) since it's ME. Okay, fine. We have a bit of a pattern. Coming south a bit we have Vermont. That works too as VT. Then we have Massachusetts. Okay, so that should be MS but that's Missouri. So things get a little scattered when you have multiple states that start with the same letter.

But Florida, the only F state, is FL which is (first letter)(second letter).

Is there any explanation for this seemingly haphazard abbreviation scheme?

Please ping me in replies.

Thanks, -†dismas†|^(talk) 16:02, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

User:Dismas: there's the Federated States of Micronesia, which would also be FA but in fact have USPS code FM, although I'm not sure since when (it would have to be since 1963, along with the rest of the codes, for this to be the reason: the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was 1947 so this might be true). Micronesia could be MA, but that's taken by Massachusetts, presumably because Mississippi needed to be MS to avoid conflicting with Missouri (MO), and then there's the Marshall Islands (MH). ...and the Northern Mariana Islands, AKA Marianas Pacificas, get the abbreviation MP. See Whac-A-Mole.  Card Zero  (talk) 16:24, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

See Apophenia. Your brain invented a pattern that does not necessarily exist. The US postal abbreviations all start with the first letter of the state/territory in question, and then proceed rather haphazardly from there, though they seemed to try to favor some logical pattern, either first and second letter OR first and last letter, OR in the case of two-word names, the first letter of each word. Beyond that, there was no harmonious system. As noted, there are all sorts of problems when you have states that tend to cluster in certain areas of alphabet, particularly the Ms are a mess; there are so many with the same first/last or first/second combinations that the best they could do in some cases was the first letter and some other random letter in the name. Look at Minnesota. The MI combination is present in 3 other states, and the MA combination in at least 3 others (going by first/second or first/last). So it gets MN. Missouri and Mississippi have "I" as both second and last letter, which is why neither got it (Michigan got MI), with Missouri getting MO and Mississippi getting MS (probably because there are so many esses in the name). I would NOT try to seek patterns where there are none. They did the best they could, given the uneven distribution of states with regard to the letters of the alphabet. --Jayron32 16:48, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

As I recall, MO was already a long-standing abbreviation for Missouri, so that was easy. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:12, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the pre-two character postal abbreviations are listed Here, and "Mo." (note lower case and period) is the prior postal abbreviation. This also includes "Penna." for Pennsylvania, "Mass," for Massachusetts, etc. --Jayron32 18:20, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

A piece of the puzzle is that if there was a two-letter old postal abbreviation, like Georgia → Ga. and Missouri → Mo., it was retained (in the form of two upper-case letters). I have not examined if there is a uniform rule that covers the remaining set, but at first glance it appears that the two-letter code is a subsequence of the old code (Mass. → MA; Mont. → MT), except of course if it had only one letter (O. O. Ohio). The puzzle piece I mentioned is then a consequence. Perhaps this subsequence rule fixes almost all cases.  --Lambiam 19:40, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

There's one more pattern, which is that if the state has a two-word name, the initials of the two words are used. When the system was extended to include Canadian provinces soon after the USPS adopted it for states, that meant New Brunswick had to have NB, and Nebraska's original NE NB had to change to NE. --corrected 184.144.97.125 (talk) 02:56, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Specifically, if memory serves, Nebraska was changed from NB to NE. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:17, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Oops, fixed. --184.144.97.125 (talk) 02:56, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

There's no MO to this madness! Clarityfiend (talk) 22:03, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

Thank you all for your responses. †dismas†|^(talk) 22:58, 11 April 2022 (UTC)