Country codes

Every country has a unique 2-letter abbreviation. The US is, well, US. France is FR, Italy is IT, and the United Kingdom is . . . wait for it . . . GB. Who decides these things, you ask? Who says Saudi Arabia will be SA, while South Africa will have to settle for ZA, for example?

Well, my dear, that would be the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and you can get a list of all 246 codes here. But what, exactly, is the ISO?

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is the world's largest developer and publisher of International Standards.
ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 157 countries, one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system.

http://www.iso.org/iso/about.htm

Your assignment is to figure out why ISO rates a 3 letter abbreviation, while everybody else in the world gets only 2.