ISO 3166-1

ISO 3166-1, is part of the ISO 3166 standard. It gives a code for the names of countries and dependent territories, and is published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The official name of the standard is Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country codes^[1]

• ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, a two-letter system, used in many applications, for example internet country code top-level domains (ccTLDs).
• ISO 3166-1 alpha-3, uses three letters, and makes it easier to work out the country name and code.
• ISO 3166-1 numeric, uses three digits. Using numbers is useful in countries that do not use the Latin alphabet. This is identical to codes defined by the United Nations Statistics Division.

ISO 3166-1 is not the only standard for country codes. Many international organizations use their own country codes, where some of them closely correspond to the ISO 3166-1 codes.

1. ↑ ISO 3166 FAQs – General questions