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Street register

published · September 16, 2026

A street register lists a country's streets and the district each runs through, so it can confirm that a street exists where an address says it does — and never that a building does.

A street register lists a country's streets and the postcode district each one is filed under, so it can confirm that a street exists where an address says it does, and can never confirm that a building does.

What Spaw answers

Great Britain's is OS Open Names, published by Ordnance Survey under the Open Government Licence and keyed by postcode district. A street it lists answers match_level: street with confirmation.street: register, and exists stays null because a register of streets has nothing to say about a building; a street it does not list answers match_level: none with confirmation.street: unconfirmed and no weight, because a road that runs through several districts is filed under one of them. The same file names the places each postcode is written with, which is what locality_matches_postcode reads for British addresses.

What it is not

It is not the Postcode Address File. Every full British address list derives from Royal Mail's licensed file, which is why exists for a British building comes only from a licensed partner and is otherwise null.

Related

markdown version: /glossary/street-register.md

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More glossary

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