country code

country code

An Internet top level domain assigned to a country. A country code is a two-letter suffix such as .us (United States), .ca (Canada) and .de (Germany). For a list of codes, see country codes A-E, country codes F-M and country codes N-Z. For a list of all top level domains, see Internet domain name. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu found a unique way to profit from its country code (see .tv).

Computers read Internet addresses from right to left. Thus, on encountering sven@univ.oslo.net.se, the message would first be sent to Sweden, since .se is the country code for Sweden. Swedish routers would then send the message to univ.oslo.net where it will be waiting for Sven the next time he signs on.

Country Codes in Search Engines
Google and Yahoo! have language selection boxes for narrowing searches to particular countries; however, other search engines let you specify the country code. For example, to find Web sites in France about wine using the AltaVista search engine (www.altavista.com), one could type +wine +domain:fr. To do the same in Go (www.go.com), one would type +wine +site:fr.

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(networking, standard)

country code - 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. Latest list.