address

/əˈdɹɛs/

nounA16 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #719 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: addressed, addresses, addressing

An address is the street, number and town that tell people where you live. Written on the front of an envelope, typed into a delivery form, recited to the receptionist who asks whether anything has changed.

Address has grown a long way past the envelope. Online it is your email address or a web address, and in computing a memory address. As a verb it does three jobs: writing the address on something (address a parcel), speaking to a person or a crowd (the head teacher addressed the school; you address a judge as 'Your Honour'), and dealing with a problem head-on (the report addresses the cost of housing), which is the sense that fills business writing. A formal speech is an address as well: the President's address to the nation. British speakers stress the noun on the first syllable and the verb on the second; Americans stress the second for both.

Definitions of address

1nounaddressThe number, street and town that say where a building is.A1~35%
“Write your address clearly on the back of the envelope.”
2nounlettersThe letters and symbols that identify an email account or a website.A2~54%
“She wrote her email address on a napkin.”
3verbnameTo write the name and address on a letter or parcel.B1~2%
“The parcel was addressed to somebody who moved out years ago.”
4verbspeakTo speak to a person or an audience.B2~2%
“He stood up to address the meeting without any notes.”
5verbgiveTo give attention to a problem and start dealing with it.B2~2%
“The new rules address none of the real causes.”
6nounformalA formal speech made to an audience.B2~5%
“Her address to the conference lasted twenty minutes.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Where it comes from

Old French adrecier meant to straighten or to direct, and under it sits Latin dīrēctus, 'straight', from dīrigō and in the end regō, 'to govern, to rule'. To address something was to aim it straight at its target — which is still what you do when you address a letter, address a crowd, or address a problem. The root, Proto-Indo-European *h₃reǵ-, is the one behind ruling and straightening.

Proto-Indo-European
*h₃reǵ-
Middle English
adressen
English, today
address

Built from

ad- · Latin — to; towards
*dīrēctiāre · roa-pro — to guide; to direct
dīrigō · Latin — to lay straight; to direct
regō · Latin — to govern, to rule

From Middle English adressen. From Middle English adressen (“to raise erect, adorn”), from Old French adrecier (“to straighten, address”) (modern French adresser), from roa-pro addīrēctiāre, from ad- (“to; towards”) + dīrēctiāre (“to guide; to direct”), from Latin dīrēctus (“straight; right”), from dīrigō (“to lay straight; to direct”), itself from regō (“to govern, to rule”). Cognate with Spanish aderezar (“to garnish; dress (food); to add spices”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Around the House, Ways of Speaking

Practise this word

address in the wild

Within a local network, a DHCP server assigns a local IP address to each device.
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
Some addresses are reserved for private networks and are not globally unique.
IP address
Within a network, the network administrator assigns an IP address to each device.
IP address
IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and was intended to replace IPv4.
IPv6
Devices on the Internet are assigned a unique IP address for identification and location definition.
IPv6

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

the regō family

address rule correct

address — used about once every 64 pages · #719 · point at the bar for the others

return address

Definitions of address

1nounaddressThe number, street and town that say where a building is.A1~35%

“Write your address clearly on the back of the envelope.”

2nounlettersThe letters and symbols that identify an email account or a website.A2~54%

“She wrote her email address on a napkin.”

3verbnameTo write the name and address on a letter or parcel.B1~2%

“The parcel was addressed to somebody who moved out years ago.”

4verbspeakTo speak to a person or an audience.B2~2%

“He stood up to address the meeting without any notes.”

5verbgiveTo give attention to a problem and start dealing with it.B2~2%

“The new rules address none of the real causes.”

6nounformalA formal speech made to an audience.B2~5%

“Her address to the conference lasted twenty minutes.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.