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:
- 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 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.
As a widely used international standard, ISO 3166-1 is implemented in other standards and used by international organizations, to allow facilitation of the exchange of goods and information. However, it is not the only standard for country codes.
Other country codes used by many international organizations are partly or totally incompatible with ISO 3166-1, although some of them closely correspond to ISO 3166-1 codes.
Criteria for inclusion
Currently 246 countries, territories, or areas of geographical interest 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:
- of the UN Statistics Division.
To be listed in the bulletin
Country Names, a country must either be:
The list of names in
Country and Region Codes for Statistical Use 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
- Additional information: Administrative language(s) alpha-3
Current codes
Officially assigned code elements
The following is a complete ISO 3166-1 encoding list of the countries which are assigned official codes. It is listed in alphabetical order by the English short country names officially used by the ISO 3166/MA, which are all from United Nations sources. For example,
Macedonia is listed as "Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of" due to the
Macedonia naming dispute, and
Taiwan is listed as "Taiwan, Province of China" due to
its political status within the UN.
Click on the button in the header to sort each column. For more information on each country and the assignment of its code elements, see the corresponding table in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2.Reserved and user-assigned code elements
Besides the officially assigned codes, code elements may be expanded by using either reserved codes or user-assigned codes.
Reserved code elements are codes which have become obsolete, or are required in order to enable a particular user application of the standard but do not qualify for inclusion in ISO 3166-1. To avoid transitional application problems and to aid users who require specific additional code elements for the functioning of their coding systems, the ISO 3166/MA, when justified, reserves these codes which it undertakes not to use for other than specified purposes during a limited or indeterminate period of time. Codes are usually reserved for former countries, overseas territories, international organizations, and special nationality status. The reserved alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes can be divided into the following four categories
(click on the links for the reserved codes of each category):
- Numeric: no reserved codes
User-assigned code elements are codes at the disposal of users who need to add further names of countries, territories, or other geographical entities to their in-house application of ISO 3166-1, and the ISO 3166/MA will never use these codes in the updating process of the standard. The following codes can be user-assigned:
- Alpha-2: AA, QM to QZ, XA to XZ, and ZZ
- Alpha-3: AAA to AAZ, QMA to QZZ, XAA to XZZ, and ZZA to ZZZ
Editions and changes
There have been two editions of ISO 3166-1. The first edition (ISO 3166-1:1997) was published on 1997-09-25, and the second edition (ISO 3166-1:2006) was published on 2006-11-20 (later corrected by
its Technical Corrigendum 1, ISO 3166-1:2006/Cor 1:2007, published on 2007-07-15).
Between different editions, the ISO 3166/MA updates the code lists by announcing the changes in newsletters. A country is usually assigned new ISO 3166-1 codes if it changes its name or its territorial boundaries. In general, new alphabetic codes are assigned if a country changes a significant part of its name, while a new numeric code is assigned if a country changes its territorial boundaries. Codes for formerly used country names that were deleted from ISO 3166-1 are published in
ISO 3166-3.
