ISO country codes list with the native names of every country, by continent

What the ISO country codes stand for

ISO 3166-1 is the part of the ISO 3166 standard that gives every country a fixed set of country codes. The International Organization for Standardization first published it in 1974. Its maintenance agency adds, changes and withdraws codes when a country is founded, renamed or split, so the list moves with the map.

The standard holds 249 officially assigned entries. That count includes dependent territories such as Greenland, Aruba or the Faroe Islands, which have codes of their own but no row on this page; here the list stays with the 196 countries and Kosovo.

Alpha-2: two letters

The short form most systems use: DE for Germany, JP for Japan, KZ for Kazakhstan. Most internet country domains are taken from it (.de, .jp, .kz). The United Kingdom is the familiar exception, with GB as its code and .uk as its domain.

Alpha-3: three letters

Closer to the name and easier to read at a glance: DEU, JPN, KAZ. Machine-readable passports use these codes. The Olympic codes (GER for Germany) and the FIFA codes are separate lists, so a table that mixes them will not match.

Numeric: three digits

Taken from the UN M49 statistical standard: 276 for Germany, 392 for Japan, 398 for Kazakhstan. Digits need no alphabet, which helps wherever letters would be transliterated. A numeric code changes when the territory does: Sudan moved from 736 to 729 after South Sudan became independent in 2011, and South Sudan received 728.

How native names are written

• ΕλλάδαGreece Greek
• 日本Japan Han
• ประเทศไทยThailand Thai
• مصرEgypt Arabic

A native name, or endonym, is the name a country uses for itself in its own official language. In the list it stands first in every row and keeps its script: Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai, Ethiopic, Georgian, Armenian, Han characters and Hangul all appear. The English name comes second because it is an exonym, a name given from outside; the background is in exonyms and endonyms.

Where a country has more than one official language, the row carries more than one form. Belgium appears in Dutch and French, Cyprus in Greek and Turkish, and Switzerland in German, French, Italian and Romansh.

Right-to-left scripts keep their direction. Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Hebrew and Dhivehi names are set right to left in their cell, so a copied name pastes in the correct order. Reading country names in native languages side by side also shows how far one script travels: Arabic serves from Morocco to Iraq, Cyrillic from Serbia to Mongolia.