ISO 3166-1, as part of the ISO 3166 standard, provides codes 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. It defines three sets of country codes:[1]
ISO 3166 has included alphabetical 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.
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]
To be listed in the bulletin Country Names, a country or territory must be any of the following:
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.
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