Delaware Abbreviation: DE and Del.

Choosing a Delaware abbreviation for the job

A simple test: if the text is for a machine or a mail carrier, pick DE. If a person will read it as part of a sentence, write Delaware.

Writing the DE state abbreviation on mail

On an envelope, the code goes after the city and a comma, followed by one space and the ZIP code. Use capital letters and leave out periods.

Delaware ZIP codes begin with 197, 198 or 199. If a label for a Delaware town shows a ZIP that starts with 2, it probably belongs to Maryland or somewhere farther south, so check before you ship.

On a website checkout, picking Delaware from a menu stores DE behind the scenes. Codes for the remaining forty nine states sit on our state abbreviations page.

Del. and AP style

Before two letter codes existed, writers shortened state names by clipping them and adding a period. Delaware became Del., and that form is still the traditional one.

Newsrooms that follow AP style spell out Delaware in the main text of an article. The short form Del. appears in datelines, the city and state line at the start of a report, as in "WILMINGTON, Del." Some legal and academic citation styles also use Del. In school papers and business letters, writing Delaware in full is the safe choice.

Codes people mix up with DE

• DC is the District of Columbia, not a state. It sits south and west of Delaware and is easy to confuse at a glance.
• MD is Maryland, which shares Delaware's western and southern border. MD also means medical doctor; see MD.
• DL is not a state code. People sometimes guess it from "Delaware."
• DE also appears as the country code for Germany, from the German word Deutschland. On a web address or a car sticker, it points to Germany. See the Germany abbreviation.

Remember that Delaware's code uses its first two letters, D and E, which makes it one of the easier codes to recall.

Delaware abbreviation examples in sentences

• "Ship the parts to Newark, DE 19711."
• "State: DE" on a job application or a car rental form.
• "DOVER, Del. The city council met Tuesday night." A dateline in a news report.
• "Her grandparents retired to the Delaware shore." Full name in a sentence.
• A table of results by state uses DE as the row label to keep columns narrow.

Notice that the code shows up in addresses, forms and tables, while full sentences use the full name.

Facts about Delaware that come up with the code

Delaware was the first state to ratify the United States Constitution, on December 7, 1787. That is where its best known nickname, the First State, comes from. Dover is the capital, and Wilmington is the largest city. It is one of the smallest states by area.

Its neighbors are Maryland (MD), Pennsylvania (PA) and, across Delaware Bay, New Jersey (NJ). The code DE arrived in the 1960s, when the Postal Service introduced ZIP codes and short, fixed state codes to go with them.