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ISO 3166-1 is part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. The official name of the standard is Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country codes. It defines three sets of country codes:[1]
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, a two-letter system, used in many applications, most prominently for country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), with some exceptions.
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-3, a three-letter system, which allows a better visual association between country name and code element than the alpha-2 code.
- ISO 3166-1 numeric, a three-digit system, with the advantage of script (writing system) independence, and hence useful for people or systems which uses a non-Latin script. This is identical to codes defined by the United Nations Statistics Division.
ISO 3166 has included alphabetic country codes since its first edition in 1974, and numeric country codes since its second edition in 1981. The country codes were first published as ISO 3166-1 in 1997 in the fifth edition of ISO 3166, when ISO 3166 were divided into three separate parts.[2]
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. For examples, see country codes.
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Criteria for inclusion
Currently, 246 countries and territories are assigned official codes in ISO 3166-1. According to the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO 3166/MA), the only way to enter a new country name into ISO 3166-1 is to have it registered in one of the following two sources:[3]
- United Nations Terminology Bulletin, Country Names, or
- Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use of the UN Statistics Division.
To be listed in the bulletin Country Names, a country must either be:
- A member country of the United Nations,
- A member of one of its specialized agencies, or
- A party to the Statute of the International Court of Justice.
The list of names in the code of the UN Statistics Division is based on the bulletin Country Names and other UN sources.
Once a country name or territory name appears in either of these two sources, it will be added to ISO 3166-1 by default.
Information included
ISO 3166-1 is published officially in both English and French. Since the second edition of ISO 3166-1, the following columns are included for each entry:
- COUNTRY NAME English (or French) short name
- English (or French) short name lower case
- English (or French) full name
- Alpha-2 code
- Alpha-3 code
- Numeric code
- Remarks
- Independent (# denotes the country is independent)
- Additional information (official language alpha-2 codes)
- Additional information (official language alpha-3 codes)
- Additional information (local name)
Officially assigned code elements
The following is a complete ISO 3166-1 encoding code list in alphabetical order by the English short country names officially used by the ISO 3166/MA, which uses country names from United Nations sources.[4] The table includes officially assigned codes only.
Codes can be sorted by clicking on their respective buttons. The last column contains the link to each country's ISO 3166-2 codes.
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