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I didn't know the answer so I looked it up. Nominatim gets postcodes from Ordnance Survey: https://nominatim.org/release-docs/3.4/data-sources/GB-Postc...

Specifically Code-Point Open: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/products/code-point-open which is updated quarterly, and in turn gets the postcodes from Royal Mail.

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It seems to me that you can download the postcode list freely: https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open/CodePointOpen

Something is missing here. If OS already has that data from RM and can make it available freely, why would they need to build another database?

Because the OS data doesn't provide addresses, just locations of the postcodes in coordinate terms, so you can't provide the typical website address lookup.

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