What (who) is country code - definition

Country codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical codes (geocodes) developed to represent countries and dependent areas, for use in data processing and communications. Several different systems have been developed to do this.

<networking, standard> Originally, a two-letter abbreviation for a particular country (or geographical region), generally used as a top-level domain. Originally country codes were just for countries; but country codes have been allocated for many areas (mostly islands) that aren't countries, such as Antarctica (aq), Christmas Island (cx) and Saint Pierre et Miquelon (pm). Country codes are defined in ISO 3166 and are used as the top level domain for Internet hostnames in most countries but hardly ever in the USA (code "us"). ISO 3166 defines short and full english and french names, two- and three-letter codes and a three-digit code for each country. There are also language codes. code-lists/list-en1.html">Latest list (http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html). (2006-12-11)

An internationalized country code top-level domain is a top-level domain in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. IDN ccTLDs are specially encoded domain names that are displayed in an end user application, such as a web browser, in their language-native script or alphabet, such as the Arabic alphabet, or a non-alphabetic writing system, such as Chinese characters.