Where India's place-name endings live

Five things the map shows

We computed every number below with a script (findings.json). A name counts as a match if any word in it ends with the ending, so “Rampur Bazar” counts as a -pur.

1. -halli stops where -palle begins. 975 offices have a word ending in -halli, and 849 of them (87%) are in Karnataka. Of the 2,479 ending in -palle/-palli/-pally, 82% are in Andhra Pradesh or Telangana. Telangana has 4,072 mapped offices and not one -halli. The line is sharp at the border: Kolar in Karnataka has 59 -halli to 14 -palle, while Chittoor next door in Andhra has 0 to 251. The edge you see is the Kannada–Telugu language border. ?q=halli&vs=palle
2. The pur belt. More than 1 in 5 post offices in Uttar Pradesh (22.2%) have a word ending in -pur, and Bihar (19.9%) and West Bengal (19.8%) are close behind. In Tamil Nadu it's 0.61%, Andhra 0.55% and Kerala 0.26%, about 1 in 400. Across India the figure is 11,591 offices, or 8.6%. #pur
3. India's most common post-office name is Rampur. 86 offices are called just “Rampur”, spread over 15 states, and 241 have it as one word of their name. The next nine are all -pur as well: Gopalpur (48), Raipur (43), Khanpur and Narayanpur (42 each). Most names don't repeat at all, though: 101,258 of the 112,598 distinct names (90%) are used by only one office. ?q=rampur
4. -palayam is about as Tamil as a name gets. Of 586 -palayam offices, 580 (99%) are in Tamil Nadu and 5 are in Puducherry. -patti is 87% Tamil (1,136 of 1,306), but it has a second, separate home in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (151 offices). There patti is a Hindi word for a share of a village, so it's the same spelling from a different language. ?q=palayam&vs=patti
5. -abad is northern and urban. 559 offices end in -abad, 216 (39%) of them in Uttar Pradesh. Haryana has the highest share (1.7% of its offices). Many of them are city neighbourhoods counted several times: Ahmedabad (26 offices), Faridabad (25), Aurangabad (21). So -abad marks cities named in the Persian tradition more than it marks villages. #abad

Read this before quoting it

• These are post-office names, which stand in for place names. A village without a post office isn't on the map, and a big city has dozens of offices (“Ahmedabad City”, “Ahmedabad Cantt”…). So counts lean towards places with many offices.
• The data is a 2024 snapshot of India Post's directory. Spellings are India Post's romanisations (palle, palli and pally can all be the same word), so try the variants.
• We normalised names to lower-case a–z, removed the B.O / S.O / H.O suffixes and dropped punctuation and accents.
• Locations are the cleaned coordinates from PIN Trail. Of the 157,126 rows we dropped the ones without usable coordinates, the ones outside the state they claim to be in (with about 10 km of slack), and offices more than 60 km from the rest of their PIN. Swapped lat/long pairs were fixed. That leaves 134,721 offices. Any single dot is approximate.
• State names come from the directory. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are split the way India Post splits them.

Sources

India Post (Department of Posts, Ministry of Communications), All India Pincode Directory, published on data.gov.in under the Government Open Data License – India. We used a 2024 snapshot of the CSV. State boundaries were used only to sanity-check coordinates: geoBoundaries IND ADM1 (CC BY). The idea comes from the classic “-ville vs -burg” toponym maps of the US and Europe.

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