Check if submitted address is in a defined area?

Hi,

Brand new to mapping, so sorry if I don’t even know the right way to ask this!

Is it possible with OSM to check if a user-submitted address falls within a given pre-defined area?

I found some documentation about ‘shapefiles’ which seems to cover defining the area part of this, but I can’t find anything about how to tell if an address is within an area. Hoping I just don’t know what to search on?

Thanks in advance for any pointers,

:)Ben