Abbreviations

Main article: Names

An extreme example of abbreviation: Lake Washington Boulevard Northeast and Main Street

The JoS. A. Bank chain was named after cofounder Joseph Alfred Bank, using a traditional abbreviation for "Joseph" and a middle initial. However, the company's name is a trademark that can only be written as abbreviated.

If the name can be spelled without an abbreviation, then don't abbreviate it. Computers can easily shorten words, but not the other way (St. could be Street or Saint). If the signs have abbreviated words and you don't know what the full word is, then use it temporarily until someone else completes it. Using short forms is a decision of software; i.e., the underlying data should have the full street name. This will allow a renderer, a router or a location finder to introduce abbreviations as necessary. See, for instance, the list of abbreviations used by Name Finder and Nominatim.

If the name is incorrect when spelled in full, however, do not falsely expand it. (For example: Wilts & Berks Canal, British placenames beginning with "St", Invalid abbreviation expansion) If modifying a name creates ambiguity (for instance, by local convention St. John's is in Newfoundland, while Saint John is in New Brunswick) it's best to keep the local usage intact.

The name "Cedar St" on a sign, which is abbreviated to save space, should be completed to Cedar Street, but the name John F. Kennedy Boulevard is not expanded to John Fitzgerald Kennedy Boulevard in English speaking countries, since the shorter version is the common spelling and pronunciation. With some (academic) titles in names the abbreviated version is also the most commonly spelled version.

Apart from following the above rules, you should always enter the full name as it appears on the street name signs but be aware that street signs may contain errors.

This guidance about abbreviations applies not only to street names but also street addresses in addr:street=*, which should generally match the names of the corresponding streets. (This example Sophox query shows how to find street addresses that incorrectly contain abbreviations in a specific language and geography.)

Regional variations

Canada

The Saint in St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, is always abbreviated "St.", and always ends with an apostrophe s. "Saint John's" is categorically incorrect. This is especially important to maintain the distinction between St. John's and Saint John, New Brunswick; in the latter by contrast Saint is always written in full.

Similarly the Sainte in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario is abbreviated.

Directional quadrants are conventionally written as two-letter abbreviations on some signs and in some print publications.

The City of Calgary is divided into four quadrants—Northwest, Northeast, Southeast and Southwest—which are customarily kept abbreviated NW, NE, SE and SW in road names and street addresses.

Absent a municipal address, rural addresses in Alberta are typically expressed using Alberta Township Survey System coordinates, which divides the province into six-by-six mile townships, each of which is subdivided into one-by-one mile sections, which are further subdivided into half-mile by half-mile quarter sections. In remote parts of the province this coordinate system is used to identify the locations of farmsteads, recreational use zones, pieces of man-made infrastructure (e.g. telecommunications masts) and the like. A full address will read:

Quarter section–section–township–range–meridian

E.g. NE-36-87-18-W4, which would be read aloud "the northeast quarter of section 36, township 87, range 18, west of the fourth meridian". Quarter sections and the 'W' in "west of the [fourth/fifth/sixth] meridian" are kept abbreviated as a matter of course.

Sweden

The name "Kistav." on a sign, which is abbreviated to save space, should be completed to Kistavägen.

United States

When most of the roads in the U.S. were imported from TIGER in 2008, each road's name=* tag contained abbreviations. In 2012, a bot automatically expanded most abbreviations following a community discussion. However, some abbreviated street names remain, either because the bot failed to detect them or because of subsequent edits by inexperienced mappers.

In American English, "St." is usually considered to be an abbreviation of either "Saint" or "Street". Therefore, the city of St. Louis, Missouri, is tagged name=Saint Louis, even though the proper written style is "St. Louis". However, when "St." is part of a family name, the expanded form "Saint" is usually considered a misspelling, thus "Lake Saint Clair" (named after the saint) but "St. Clair Township" (named after Arthur St. Clair).

Tagging idiosyncratic abbreviations explicitly

When a feature has an abbreviation that is idiosyncratic rather than systematic, tagging the abbreviation explicitly allows data consumers to discover the abbreviation without overloading the usual abbreviation tables with extremely rare abbreviations. In English, it isn't always the case that you can abbreviate a compound word using an initialism, but sometimes a particular initialism or acronym is expected as an alternative to writing out the name in full. For example, "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention" should be abbreviated as "CDC" rather than "CDCP".

short_name=* is generally used to explicitly record abbreviations and other shortenings, but there are several common synonyms. ref=* is also used on some kinds of features, especially administrative boundaries, when the feature isn't also referred to by a numeric identifier.

See also

• Invalid Abbreviation Expansion
• talk-ca mailing list discussion thread on Canada's road abbreviations.
  • Calgary road tagging guidelines
  • Edmonton road tagging guidelines