Words & Stuff

It can be handy to have short abbreviations for country names. For example, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) specifies a three-letter “country code” for every country/territory/province on its official list of such entities. (…Of course, that list represents a bunch of decisions about what regions are countries, and what their names are; those are often deeply politically contentious questions.) Those ISO country codes are used in machine-readable passports, among other uses.

(The ISO standard that specifies these codes was created in 1974; I’m just speculating here, but I suspect that the limitations of computer systems at the time made the standardization of these country codes seem more necessary than it might seem today. That is, being able to unambiguously specify a country using three capital Latin letters presumably simplified storage and recognition of the country names. I suspect that if such a standard were developed from scratch with modern more-capable computer systems in mind, the creators of it would see much less need for such a rigidly defined format.)

But ISO wasn’t the first organization to specify three-letter country codes for countries. For example, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) appears to have been using three-letter country codes since at least the 1940s. Standards often proliferate.

And at some point, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) also came up with their own set of three-letter country codes. Why use someone else’s list when you could make up your own? (I don’t know when FIFA’s list was created; their may have come first for all I know.)

So for eas of comparison, Wikipedia provides a handy table comparing the IOC, FIFA, and ISO codes. Many of them are the same across all three organizations, but many are not.