Ask two sign permit technicians what a “monument sign” is and they will probably agree on the concept in about two seconds: a low, ground-mounted sign with a solid base, as opposed to a taller pole or pylon sign perched on a narrow support. Ask two municipal codes to describe the same distinction, and you get something much messier. We went back into our own extracted data — the same records behind our ground-sign and awning-sign articles — and re-read a sample of them specifically for how many different ways the same underlying concept gets written down. The answer: a lot more than you would expect for something this basic.
Same concept, at least 8 different phrasings
Looking at just the attribute that records which ground-sign types a code allows, we found at least eight visibly distinct phrasings that all describe the same underlying concept — a monument sign is permitted, and so is a taller pylon or pole sign, as two separate allowed categories in the same zone:
- “Monument and pylon/pole”
- “Monument; Pylon/pole”
- “Monument (small, ~6-8 ft) and Pylon/Pole (larger)”
- “Monument (small, ~6-8 ft) and pylon/pole (larger)”
- “Monument sign permitted; Pole sign permitted”
- “Monument (small, ~6-8 ft); Pylon/pole (larger)”
- “Monument; Pylon/Pole”
- “Monument and Pylon/Pole”
Read those eight side by side and the pattern is obvious: they are near-duplicates. The differences are almost entirely capitalization, punctuation (a semicolon here, the word “and” there), and whether a parenthetical height range got tacked on. Nobody looking at these eight strings would conclude they describe eight different rules. They describe one rule, written down eight slightly different ways.
The pattern repeats: how awning sign area gets calculated
The same thing shows up in a completely different attribute — how an awning sign’s area is calculated for the purposes of a size limit. The underlying concept here is also simple: only the lettering or graphic copy on the awning counts toward the area calculation, not the entire physical awning. Here is how that one concept gets phrased across our data:
- “Copy only”
- “Copy of awning”
- “Copy of the awning”
- “Only the portion of the awning that is covered by the sign”
- “Only the portion over the awning”
- “Copy of awning, not whole awning”
Six phrasings, one concept, and the same story: minor rewording of an identical rule, showing up as six visibly different strings rather than one standardized value.
An honest caveat about what this actually proves
Before drawing a conclusion, it’s worth being direct about a limitation in this finding. Some of this apparent vocabulary spread is our own extraction pipeline’s paraphrasing of the source ordinance text, not necessarily proof that thousands of independent municipal code drafters each sat down and chose a unique way to say the same thing. When an automated process reads an ordinance and summarizes what it found, it can introduce its own wording variation on top of whatever variation already existed in the original text. We can’t fully separate “the original ordinances really did use eight different phrasings” from “our own summarization added some of that variation.” So we are not presenting this as clean, direct evidence that thousands of human code drafters independently invented thousands of unique phrasings — that would be overclaiming what a measurement like this can actually show.
The narrower point that still holds up
Even with that caveat fully accounted for, there is a real and much more defensible conclusion here: municipal sign codes, across the country, plainly never converged on shared terminology for even basic, common concepts. Whether the exact count of distinct real-world phrasings is 8 or somewhat fewer once you subtract out extraction-pipeline noise, the fact remains that no standard vocabulary exists across municipalities for “monument sign allowed alongside a taller pole sign” or “only the lettering counts toward area.” Every jurisdiction’s planning department wrote its own version, independently, with its own preferred phrasing, its own punctuation habits, and its own level of added detail.
Why this matters if you work across multiple jurisdictions
The practical consequence is specific: cross-referencing two towns’ codes by keyword alone is unreliable. If you search one municipality’s code for the word “pylon” and come up empty, that does not tell you pylon signs are prohibited there — the same allowance might be written as “pole sign,” “freestanding sign over 8 feet,” or folded into a general “ground sign” category with a height threshold instead of a separate name at all. A technician doing manual research who relies on a single keyword search across several towns’ codes is at real risk of a false negative — concluding a sign type is prohibited or unaddressed simply because the drafter in that town used different words for the identical concept covered somewhere else in the same ordinance.
This is a large part of why extracting sign rules well requires reading for the underlying concept, not pattern-matching on specific terms. A rule engine — or a technician — searching only for exact vocabulary will miss rules that are present but phrased differently than expected, in both directions: missing an allowance that exists under a different name, and missing a prohibition phrased as a restriction rather than a ban.
The same problem, three floors down
The vocabulary problem is not confined to sign type names. It reaches all the way into the units. The 188 digital-brightness rules in our corpus that carry a unit at all are written in 33 different spellings of that unit — “nits,” “NITS,” “cd/m2,” “candelas per sq meter” — and we published a reconciliation error in digital sign brightness limits for exactly that reason before catching it. The 4,835 awning sign area rules use 3,929 distinct wordings, which is the finding underneath awning sign clearance rules. It also explains why our own extraction taxonomy ended up with 492 category labels rather than a tidy fixed list, as described in how we actually read a million pages of municipal code. Wherever municipalities were free to choose words, they chose differently.
How to check the rule without guessing at vocabulary
A report translates whatever specific phrasing the local ordinance uses into a standard set of categories, cited back to the actual ordinance text — so you are not left guessing whether “pylon,” “pole,” or “freestanding” means the same thing in the town you are working in. Creating an account is free.