Multi-City Spellings -- the best way to validate a city's spelling

Web masters / Fraud Detection specialists: do you allow users to type in a city name in an address, or do you allow users to find the nearest dealer or store by entering in their city and state? If so, then you need our Multi-City Spellings (MCS) data file!

What occurs is that a customer or user will often abbreviate or misspell a city and you won't get an exact match, which will generate an error. At best, the customer may figure out what happened and fix it; at worst, they will become annoyed and leave your site at the point where they're placing an order!

The MCS file is a file which consists of just two fields: Non-standard City Name and Standard City Name. These cities are found in both the U.S. and Canada. The non-standard name has just about any normal way a person may abbreviate or misspell a city and the standard name has the way we spell that city in our data files. You can then match up the correct city name and eliminate generating an error message which saves time and hassle for the customer (they may even be impressed at how well you did matching up the name!).

For instance: you can spell / abbreviate Fort Myers Beach many ways:

• Ft Myers Beach
• Ft. Myers Beach
• Fort Myers Beach
• Ft Myers Bch
• Ft. Myers Bch
• Fort Myers Bch. etc.

In the MCS file, we provide these listings for you! We also include many unusual abbreviations that are commonly used such as: L.A. for Los Angeles, Jax for Jacksonville, NYC for New York City, etc. This will match records that a Soundex search won't match.

Doesn't the U.S. Postal Service (and their resellers) have a similar product?

No! They have a file of over 70,000 records that has some alternate spellings for a city, but they don't have every combination. Also, this file is at the postal code level, not the city level, and is full of error records which you don't want (such as business names, invalid names, etc.). As an added bonus, we include Canadian city names as well.