Talk:ZIP Code

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

User:Largoplazo moved ZIP code to this spelling with the following edit summary:

• This is a trademark, a brand name, of the U.S. Postal Service, for the U.S. version of what are generically known as "postal codes"

They also left the following comment on the talk page:

• I moved this page from ZIP code after someone inquired about it at the corresponding page on English Wikipedia. The corresponding move occurred on English Wikipedia in 2016 pursuant to a discussion I initiated there.

Rather than just jerking it (and the plural) back with a rude comment about how this isn't Wikipedia and how we're a descriptive dictionary, I thought I would bring it here so we can be sure we do it right. The problem is that determining relative usage of different case forms is rather difficult. Plus, there should be entries at both case forms, with one as the alt form. There are also other case-form entries such as zip code that were unaffected.

I should add that there's a 2008 RFD discussion linked to from the talk page. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:51, 23 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

This may help. —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 23:02, 23 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

This slightly improved Google N-gram (1960-2008)] shows that, in order of frequency in the sampled books the frequency order is zip code, ZIP code, Zip Code, ZIP Code, Zip code, ZIP CODE, with zip code being about 10 times more common than ZIP CODE and about 5 times more common than ZIP Code post 2000. There are also some solid-spelled versions, but they are much less common, though the most common zipcode is about as common as ZIP CODE.

It's so much better to have credible corpus-based facts than the speculations of the 2008 discussion. DCDuring (talk) 02:04, 24 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

BTW, the collocation "international zip code" is suggestive that some English speakers think of zip code as including any post/postal code. DCDuring (talk) 03:18, 24 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Checking the latest ngram corpus data, not much has changed. And according to w:ZIP Code, the trademark already expired in 1997, so this whole renaming business is/was a bit pointless IMO. – Jberkel

I went ahead and split this into a trademark / generic sense, and yes, zip code does get used to refer to non-US codes. – Jberkel 22:01, 22 March 2021 (UTC)Reply