ISO 3166 is a three-part geographic coding standard for coding the names of countries and dependent areas, and the principal subdivisions thereof, published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The official name is Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions. The ISO 3166 standard is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO 3166/MA), whose address is at the ISO central office in Geneva. Originally it was located at the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) in Berlin. ISO 3166 was first published in 1974. It has been modified over the years, with subsequent editions published in 1981, 1988, and 1993. The most recent edition, its fifth, was published between 1997 and 1999.
Parts
Since the fifth edition, the standard has been divided into three parts:
- ISO 3166-1, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country codes, defines codes for country and dependent area names. 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. Currently, there are three different codes for each country or territory:
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 – two-letter country codes (most notably used for country code top-level domains)
- ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 – three-letter country codes
- ISO 3166-1 numeric – three-digit country codes
- ISO 3166-2, Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 2: Country subdivision code, defines codes for the principal subdivisions of a country or dependent area. It was first published in 1998, with the following subsequent changes:
- ISO 3166-2:2000-06-21 – Newsletter I-1
- ISO 3166-2:2002-05-21 – Newsletter I-2
- ISO 3166-2:2002-08-20 – Newsletter I-3
- ISO 3166-2:2002-12-10 – Newsletter I-4
- ISO 3166-2:2003-09-05 – Newsletter I-5
- ISO 3166-2:2004-03-08 – Newsletter I-6
- ISO 3166-2:2005-09-13 – Newsletter I-7
- ISO 3166-2:2007-04-17 – Newsletter I-8
- 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of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 3: Code for formerly used names of countries, defines codes for superseded ISO 3166-1 codes. It was first published in 1999.
See also
- Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics
- Federal Information Processing Standard
- ISO 639 (codes for languages)
- List of international license plate codes
