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ISO 3166-2 is part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and defines codes for the names of the principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces or states) of all countries coded in ISO 3166-1. The official name of the standard is Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions – Part 2: Country subdivision code. It was first published in 1998.

The purpose of ISO 3166-2 is to establish an international standard of short alphanumeric codes to represent any administrative division of a country in a more convenient and less ambiguous form than its full name. Each ISO 3166-2 code consists of two parts, separated by a hyphen. The first part is the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of the country, and the second part is a string of up to three alphanumeric characters. The second part is usually obtained from national sources and stems from coding systems already in use in the country concerned. There are currently around 4200 different codes.^{[citation needed]}

ISO 3166-1 is not the only standard for region codes. Examples of other region codes used by other international organizations include:

• UN/LOCODE, used by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)
• Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), used by the United States (see list of FIPS region codes)
• Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), used by the European Union

[edit] Current codes

For a complete list of all ISO 3166-2 codes, see either of the following:

• Sorted by country code: Table of officially assigned code elements in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 (click on links in the first column, Alpha-2)
• Sorted by country name: Table of officially assigned code elements in ISO 3166-1 (click on links in the last column, ISO 3166-2 codes)

[edit] Format and structure

The format and structure of the codes are different for each country. Some of the codes are developed by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (ISO 3166/MA); these are copyrighted. Others are already in use in the specific countries.

[edit] Changes

Changes to ISO 3166-2 are announced in newsletters by the ISO 3166/MA. These changes are mostly spelling corrections, addition and deletion of subdivisions, and modification of the administrative structure. Since the first publication of ISO 3166-2 in 1998, nine newsletters have been released:^[1]

The second edition of ISO 3166-2 (ISO 3166-2:2007) was published on 2007-12-15, which comprised a consolidation of all changes from the first edition (ISO 3166-2:1998) as published in the newsletters from I-1 to I-9.^[2]

[edit] See also

• Table of administrative country subdivisions by country

[edit] References

1. ^ Updates on ISO 3166
2. ^ Second edition of ISO 3166-2 published

[edit] External links

• ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
  • Official page of ISO 3166-2
  • Tracking changes in ISO 3166-2 (sorted by country code)
• UN/LOCODE, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNCEC)
  • Location Code list
  • Subdivision Codes
• http://philmcrew.com/countrysubentity.txt