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Right, but confusingly, GB is the ISO 2 code for the United Kingdom, even though the United Kingdom is much bigger than Great Britain, where the GB abbreviation comes from.


Pet hate: Regularly running into dropdowns that list countries by name, but sort them by country code.


Thanks for explaining where that apparently random ordering comes from - drives me nuts too!


At least for the identification sticker / stripe on cars we've moved from GB to UK. Maybe we'll just move to uk as the ISO 2 letter code.


https://web.archive.org/web/20120616044022/http://www.iso.or...

Apparently "United" and "Kingdom" aren't valid for ISO, so they went with ignoring part of the name completely.


That’s interesting. It kind of makes sense. I guess the US makes this rule kind of funny too. I guess we’re lucky we didn’t get .am for “America.”


IVR codes are not ISO 3166-1 codes. The ISO codes are all two letters; the IVR codes range from one to three letters.


Makes sense, also in keeping with the excessively complicated naming that thousands of years of dispute produces.




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