addressee
Americannoun
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addressees
plural
noun
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a person or organization to whom a letter, parcel, etc, is addressed
-
a person who is addressed in conversation, a speech, a poem, etc
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of addressee
Explanation
The person who receives a letter in the mail is an addressee. If you're mailing a birthday gift, be sure to write the addressee's name and address clearly on the package! Whenever you send something to a particular address, you indicate an addressee. If you send your best friend a postcard from Hawaii, you'll include her name, street number, city, state and zip code, making her the addressee. Adding -ee to the end of a word is one way to indicate the recipient of an action; along with addressee, words like appointee and employee also use this suffix.
Vocabulary lists containing addressee
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The mysterious addressee was then sent seven letters, a bank card, a PIN, overdraft limit warnings and a warning that an outstanding debt could be referred to a credit reference agency.
From BBC ● Nov. 24, 2025
In such a case, the apparent addressee is not the real addressee: the teacher is trying to pass on information indirectly to one or more other students.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 19, 2023
“Needless to say the addressee was quite startled when they opened the box,” Port Chester police wrote on Facebook.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 31, 2022
“Here we go,” he said before slicing into an envelope with a return address on Queens Boulevard in New York, marked “Personal and confidential — to be opened by addressee only.”
From New York Times ● Apr. 27, 2022
The Korean language has no fewer than six different levels of conversational address, depending on the relationship between the addressee and the addresser: formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain.
From "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
Steps include blocking specific stations and IP addressees that consistently transmit false data.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 2, 2022
Lara Jean’s secret stash of unsent love letters to Josh and four other crushes winds up being mysteriously stamped and sent to the addressees.
From New York Times ● Aug. 30, 2018
They come from a tradition of “vinegar valentines,” which, as I wrote on the Vault in 2013, delivered a payload of burn to their unfortunate addressees.
From Slate ● Feb. 14, 2018
In some cases, the emails were part of long chains, on which Mrs. Clinton was copied at the beginning, but later left off the list of addressees.
From New York Times ● Sep. 23, 2016
They know nothing other than they get paid, very well, to make sure that the addressees are in receipt of their packages.
From Terminal Compromise: computer terrorism: when privacy and freedom are the victims: a novel by Winn Schwartau
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
