ISO 3166

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 codes, 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, e.g. uk instead of GB for United Kingdom).
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.

Loading... please wait...

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/ISO_3166

Country code

Country Codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical codes (geocodes) developed to represent countries and dependent areas, for use in data processing and communications. Several different systems have been developed to do this. The best known of these is ISO 3166-1. The term country code frequently refers to international dialing codes, the E.164 country calling codes.

ISO 3166-1

This standard defines for most of the countries and dependent areas in the world:

a two-letter (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2)

a three-letter (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3), and

a three-digit numeric (ISO 3166-1 numeric) code.

The two-letter codes are used as the basis for some other codes or applications, for example,

for ISO 4217 currency codes and

with deviations, for country code top-level domain names (ccTLDs) on the Internet: list of Internet TLDs.

For more applications see ISO 3166-1 alpha-2.

Other country codes

European Union:

Before the 2004 EU enlargement the EU used the UN Road Traffic Conventions license plate codes; since then, it uses ISO 3166-1
The Nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques (Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics, NUTS) of the European Union, mostly focusing on subdivisions of the EU member states

List of country calling codes

Country calling codes or country dial in codes are telephone dialing prefixes for the member countries of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). They are defined by the ITU-T in standards E.123 and E.164. The prefixes enable international direct dialing (IDD), and are also referred to as international subscriber dialing (ISD) codes.

Country codes are a component of the international telephone numbering plan, and are necessary only when dialing a telephone number to establish a call to another country. Country codes are dialed before the national telephone number. By convention, international telephone numbers are represented by prefixing the country code with a plus sign (+), which also indicates to the subscriber that the local international dialing prefix must first be dialed. For example, the international dialing prefix in all countries belonging to the North American Numbering Plan is 011, while it is 00 in most European, Asian and African countries. On GSM (cellular) networks, the prefix may automatically be inserted when the user prefixes a dialed number with the plus sign.