Country Codes
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free Country Codes trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every country has a two-letter code. It ends web addresses, turns up in banking and currency abbreviations, and sits on shipping labels and drop-down menus everywhere. The list is officially called ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, and although most codes are simply the first two letters of a country's English name, plenty are not. This quiz asks you to match codes to countries and countries to codes, with a lean toward the ones that trip people up: codes taken from a country's name in its own language, codes that belong to places you would not guess, and codes that outlived the countries they were made for. It also covers who decides what gets a code and how a few lucky pairs of letters became valuable internet real estate. It suits geography fans, developers who have stared at a country menu, travellers and anyone who enjoys an abbreviation puzzle. Every question comes with its answer and a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which small Pacific country earns millions a year by licensing its ISO code, TV, as an internet domain?
Tuvalu
Tuvalu makes little local use of .tv, yet video sites such as Twitch made it so valuable that a 2021 deal with GoDaddy raised the government's yearly payments to $10 million.
Q 02The ISO country code CH comes from Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name of which multilingual European country?
Switzerland
Switzerland used the Latin name because it is neutral toward the country's four official languages, which is also why its web addresses end in .ch.
Q 03Which Caribbean territory struck gold in the artificial intelligence boom because its ISO country code happens to be AI?
Anguilla
Anguilla's treasury collects the fees on every .ai address, and a minister said the domain would bring in about 47% of state income in 2025, up from under 1% before the boom.
Q 04The United Kingdom's web addresses end in .uk, but which two letters are its official ISO country code?
GB
GB, for Great Britain, was meant to be the web domain too, but British academics had set up .uk a few months before the ISO-based list was compiled, and .gb fell into disuse.
Q 05Which country's ISO code, CA, is identical to the postal abbreviation of the US state of California?
Canada
Canada's code doubles as its web domain, and .ca addresses are open only to people and organisations that meet Canadian presence requirements.
Q 06Which European country's ISO code is DE, the same two letters as the postal abbreviation of the US state of Delaware?
Germany
Germany takes DE from Deutschland, the country's own name for itself, which is why German web addresses end in .de rather than anything based on the English name.
Q 07Addresses ending in .su are still registered decades after the collapse of which country, holder of the ISO code SU?
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was assigned .su in September 1990, just 15 months before it dissolved, and the domain has outlived its country under Russian administration.
Q 08Tech start-ups love .io addresses, but the ISO code IO was assigned to a remote island territory in which ocean?
Indian
Indian Ocean islands of the Chagos Archipelago were coded IO as the British Indian Ocean Territory; tech firms adopted the domain because I/O is shorthand for input/output.
Q 09On most phones, a pair of Unicode regional indicator letters spelling an ISO country code is displayed as which symbol?
A national flag
A national flag has no character of its own in Unicode: each one is built from two letter symbols, which spares the Unicode Consortium from ruling on which countries to include.
Q 10Which ISO country code represents Spain, taken from the country's name in Spanish rather than in English?
ES
ES comes from España, so Spanish web addresses end in .es, a suffix that is also borrowed for wordplay in web addresses in several other languages.
Q 11The ISO code CO, also Colorado's postal abbreviation, ends web addresses sold worldwide by which Latin American country?
Colombia
Colombia opened .co to buyers worldwide in 2010 and had taken more than 500,000 registrations by the middle of September that year.
Q 12Which country received the ISO code ME on independence in 2006 and marketed it worldwide for personal websites?
Montenegro
Montenegro got ME because MO, MN, MT, MG and MR were already taken, as was CG for its own name, Crna Gora; 100,000 .me names were registered within weeks of the 2008 launch.
Q 13The link shortener Bitly built its brand on a web address ending in LY, the ISO code of which country?
Libya
Q 21The ISO code GA, the postal abbreviation of the US state of Georgia, belongs to which French-speaking country?
Gabon
Gabon holds GA, so the country of Georgia uses GE instead; from 2013 until 2023 Gabon's registry even gave .ga web addresses away for free.
Q 22Which British territory in the Caribbean has the ISO country code KY, a pair that skips its initial letter?
Cayman Islands
The Cayman Islands are KY, while CI and CY belong to Ivory Coast and Cyprus; the territory's three-letter code, CYM, sits much closer to the name.
Q 23Kosovo has no official ISO country code, so the European Commission and the IMF use which temporary two-letter stand-in?
XK
XK is safe to borrow because ISO has promised never to assign any code from XA to XZ, leaving that whole range free for users' own purposes.
Libya's registry lets foreigners buy .ly names but forbids any that are obscene, scandalous or contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality.
Q 14Which Adriatic country, known to its own people as Hrvatska, has the ISO country code HR?
Croatia
Croatia takes both its code and its .hr web addresses from Hrvatska, so neither shares a letter pattern with the English name; Hungary, the other H candidate, is HU.
Q 15The ISO country code EE comes from Eesti, the local name of which country on the Baltic Sea?
Estonia
Estonia calls itself Eesti, and companies whose names end in a double E have claimed .ee web addresses now that the domain is sold globally.
Q 16The ISO country code ZA abbreviates the Dutch-language name of which country?
South Africa
South Africa is Zuid-Afrika in Dutch, and ZA has been the country's international vehicle code since 1936, decades before the ISO list existed.
Q 17Which country's ISO code, MA, comes from the French form of its name rather than the Arabic or English one?
Morocco
Morocco is Maroc in French, a spelling that also survives in Maroc Telecom, the operator that has been the technical maintainer of the .ma web domain since 1995.
Q 18The ISO code BU was replaced by MM in 1989, when Burma's government changed the country's English name to what?
Myanmar
Myanmar took MM, but the internet never caught up with the old name: no .bu domain was ever assigned, and .mm arrived only in 1997.
Q 19Instead of the official ISO code, the European Commission uses the letters EL for which EU member state?
Greece
Greece keeps the letters EL online too: in 2014 ICANN let the country add .ελ, a web domain written in the Greek alphabet, beside its ISO-based .gr.
Q 20Which ISO country code belongs to Sweden, even though the country's name in Swedish is Sverige?
SE
SE is Sweden's code, while SV, the pair a Swedish speaker might expect from Sverige, belongs to El Salvador instead.
Q 24The ISO code ZR was retired after which country was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997?
Zaire
Zaire's .zr web domain was phased out along with the name and deleted in 2001, replaced by .cd for the Congo's new title.
Q 25Which ISO code represents Antarctica, its second letter borrowed from the French spelling of the continent's name?
AQ
AQ comes from Antarctique, and .aq web addresses are reserved for organisations that work on the continent or promote the Antarctic region.
Q 26Which ISO code represents Chad, a pair that follows the French spelling of the country's name rather than the English?
TD
TD follows Tchad, the French spelling, and the same two letters became the country's web domain when .td was made available in 1997.
Q 27Nigeria's ISO country code is NG, so which pair of letters belongs to Niger, its neighbour to the north?
NE
NE is Niger's code and, by coincidence, Nebraska's postal abbreviation, which was NB until 1969, when it was changed to avoid confusion with New Brunswick.
Q 28Which ISO country code was assigned to North Korea, whose web domain of the same letters was not created until 2007?
KP
KP became a working web domain only after ICANN had twice turned down North Korea's applications, and registration is limited to bodies based in the country.
Q 29Most ISO currency codes begin with the two-letter country code, so which three letters stand for the Japanese yen?
JPY
JPY joins JP for Japan to Y for yen, following the rule that the third letter is usually the initial of the currency's main unit.
Q 30A new country can enter the ISO code list only once its name is registered by which international organisation?
United Nations
United Nations lists are the only gateway: a name must appear in the UN's Country Names bulletin or its statistical code list before ISO will assign letters.