The numeric code identifies a physical territory, and the letters a country name. Codes withdrawn from use may not be reused for five years. The codes OO, OOO, and are designated for use as "escape codes" to indicate that additional codes are being used. The term "country" is perhaps a little misleading: not all the "countries" in ISO are actually independent. Rather, many of them are geographically separate territories that are legally portions or dependencies of other countries. Nonetheless the term "country" is used throughout.
Where the code for a country includes territory also included in another code, a code for the exclusive part can be formed by replacing the second and third letters by X. ISO was first issued in , and the three digit numbers were mostly added in In this way, you can be sure that your database is always using the most up-to-date information from ISO.
ISO has three parts: codes for countries, codes for subdivisions and formerly used codes codes that were once used to describe countries but are no longer in use. 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.
The codes for subdivisions are represented as the alpha-2 code for the country, followed by up to three characters. Names and codes for subdivisions are usually taken from relevant official national information sources.
The formerly used codes are four-letter codes alpha How the alpha-4 codes are constructed depends on the reason why the country name has been removed.
Read more about the different types of codes in the Glossary for ISO For more information, visit the ISO Store. ISO is regularly updated to reflect changes in country names and subdivisions. The numeric country code is assigned by the UN. As a general rule, the ISO Maintenance Agency does not assign official country code elements to other geopolitical areas or countries that are not member states of the UN.
To be considered, some criteria, amongst others, include that the area be physically separated from its parent country and outside its territorial waters. Even if all criteria are met, the ISO Maintenance Agency may decide not to assign a code element, for example, due to the very limited number of official alpha-2 code elements available.
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