208 Words You Walk Past Every Day Without Noticing
There is a word for the study of street names. It's odonymy. You're welcome. Write that one down, because it's going on your list of words to drop at parties alongside "petrichor" and "defenestration." But odonymy is more than just a fun vocabulary flex. It turns out the street names you drive down every day are hiding an enormous, weirdly official word list that word game players have been sleeping on.
The Government Made You a Word List (You Didn't Ask For It)
The U.S. Postal Service maintains an approved list of 208 street suffix words. That's right. A federal agency sat down and decided exactly which words count as valid street endings. AVENUE. BOULEVARD. COURT. DRIVE. All of them, officially blessed by bureaucrats who probably never once thought about their Scrabble rack.
208 is a lot. Think about how many street suffixes you can actually name off the top of your head. A dozen? Twenty? The USPS had 208 of them ready to go. Which means there are roughly 190 you've never thought to use in a word game.
Australia Said: 55 Is Plenty
Standards Australia looked at this problem and decided 208 was excessive. Their official recommendation: 55 suffix forms. The UK, Canada, and Hong Kong each have their own lists too, all shorter.
Here's the interesting angle for word players. Different editions of word games use different dictionaries, and those dictionaries reflect different regional English. If you play international Scrabble, you're playing with a much bigger lexicon than North American Scrabble. The same logic applies to street words. An Australian suffix might be perfectly valid in one dictionary and absent from another.
One possibility is that some of those 55 Australian suffixes are words that would score beautifully on a Scrabble board but never come up in casual play, simply because nobody thinks to try them. Worth investigating before your next game.
Odonymy as Word Game Strategy
The real takeaway here is that official word lists from unexpected sources are some of the best places to find valid game words. The USPS wasn't making a word game list. They were solving a mail delivery problem. But a list of 208 officially recognized English words is a list of 208 officially recognized English words, regardless of why it was made.
Street suffixes have a few things going for them as game words. They tend to be short. They tend to be real, common English words used in actual speech. And because they come from an official standardized list, they're almost certainly in any major word game dictionary.
Next time you're stuck staring at your tiles, remember: somewhere out there, a postal worker approved 208 words that could save your game.
Where to Find the List
Wikipedia's Street suffix page has the full rundown. The 208 USPS entries, the 55 Australian ones, and the regional lists for other countries. It's not the most glamorous Wikipedia rabbit hole, but if you love words, odonymy might just be your new favorite niche.
Because the best word game players know that word lists are everywhere. You just have to look.
Source: Languagelog