SAD, MAD and PEAR: The Postcodes That Accidentally Spell Words

Take any postcode and cross out the digits. S1 1AD becomes SAD. M1 1AD becomes MAD. PE1 1AR, in the middle of Peterborough, becomes PEAR. Nobody at Royal Mail planned any of this, but with 1.8 million postcodes in circulation the alphabet was always going to produce accidents.

We stripped the numbers from every live postcode in Britain and checked what was left against a word list. The letters form 56,068 distinct combinations, and dozens of them are real words.

The word league

The geography is pleasingly wrong throughout. Sheffield, one of the most landlocked cities in Britain, owns every postcode spelling SEA. The GLENs are all in Gloucester rather than the Highlands. Chelsea has the SWANs, Glasgow has the GAS, and Liverpool, fittingly, has all 193 LADs.

The letters that never appear

The gaps are as deliberate as the words are accidental. No British postcode begins with Q, V or X. And the final two letters of a postcode never use C, I, K, M, O or V. Royal Mail excluded them by design, because they are too easy to confuse with each other or with digits when handwritten: an I looks like a 1, an O like a 0, a V like a U scrawled in a hurry.

Our data confirms the rulebook exactly. Across every one of the 1.8 million postcodes we checked, not a single one breaks either rule. It is why you can live in a BAD postcode or a SAD one, but nowhere in Britain can ever spell COW, FOX or MIX.

How we worked it out

We removed the digits from all 1.8 million live postcodes in our database and grouped what remained, then matched the resulting letter strings against a list of common English words. Counts are of full postcodes whose letters spell the word in reading order with nothing left over. Try your own postcode with the postcode lookup and see what it spells.