ISO 3166 - And what has that standard got to do with me?

• Have you ever sent a letter abroad?
• Do you have a passport?
• Have you ever bought foreign currency?
• Do you own shares from abroad?
• Have you ever sent an email to France, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Japan or any other country in the world?

If your answer to any of these questions is Yes, then you are a user of ISO 3166-1 Country codes.

Here are the explanations why:

• All national postal organizations in the world exchange international mail between them in containers carrying ISO 3166-1 codes for identification of the country of destination.
• In machine-readable passports the three letter code of ISO 3166-1 is used to determine the nationality of the user (ISO/IEC 7501-1).
• Currencies are identified by a code based on the ISO 3166-1 which identifies them in international transactions (ISO 4217).
• The International Securities Identification Number (ISO 6166) is a system which allow precise identification of shares issued in one country but traded internationally.
• The Internet domain name sytems uses ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes to define country-coded Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs), e.g., for the countries listed above; ".fr", ."za", ".au", ".br", or ".jp".

ISO 3166 is behind most of today's computerized systems which store and process information related to countries and country names. And since most applications use ISO 3166-1 they can communicate easily. That is one of the purposes of standardization: facilitation of the exchange of goods and information.

So the answer to the initial question in the header is: ISO 3166-1 makes your life easier! - See also Implementation of ISO 3166-1.