ISO 3166
standard code for names of countries, dependent territories, special areas of geographical interest, and their main subdivisions
ISO 3166 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, special areas of geographical interest, and their principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces or states). The official name of the standard is Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions.
Parts
It consists of three parts:
ISO 3166-1, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country code, defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. It defines three sets of country codes:
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 – two-letter country codes, which are the most widely used of the three, and used most prominently for the Internet's country code top-level domains (with a few exceptions).
ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 – three-letter country codes, which allow a better visual association between the codes and the country names than the alpha-2 codes.
ISO 3166-1 numeric – three-digit country codes, which are identical to those developed and maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division, with the advantage of script (writing system) independence, and hence useful for people or systems using non-Latin scripts.
ISO 3166-2, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 2: Country subdivision code, defines codes for the names of the principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces, states, departments, regions) of all countries coded in ISO 3166-1.
ISO 3166-3, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 3: Code for formerly used names of countries, defines codes for country names which have been deleted from ISO 3166-1 since its first publication in 1974.
Editions
The first edition of ISO 3166, which included only alphabetic country codes, was published in 1974. The second edition, published in 1981, also included numeric country codes, with the third and fourth editions published in 1988 and 1993 respectively.
The public source identifies “ISO 3166” as standard code for names of countries, dependent territories, special areas of geographical interest, and their main subdivisions. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around standard, code and names.
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This entry incorporates text from “ISO 3166” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.