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It defines three sets of country codes: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 – two-letter country codes which are also used to create the ISO 3166-2 country subdivision codes and the Internet country code top-level domains.
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are two-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard [1] published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to represent countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest.
Below is a list of two-letter codes (ISO alpha-2), and the three letter codes (ISO alpha-3), as well as the United Nations, used numerical code M49 for countries, dependencies, and other areas. (Dependencies marked in Italic writing)
More common for this is the 2-letter code alpha-2. It is mainly used for assigning a country-specific domain. The European IBAN system for bank account numbers also uses this code.
ISO 3166-1 (Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 1: Country codes) is a standard defining codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest.
The ISO country codes are internationally recognized codes that designate every country and most of the dependent areas a two-letter combination or a three-letter combination; it is like an acronym, that stands for a country or a state.
The country codes can be represented either as a two-letter code (alpha-2) which is recommended as the general-purpose code, a three-letter code (alpha-3) which is more closely related to the country name and a three-digit numeric code (numeric-3) which can be useful if you need to avoid using Latin script.
