Some countries have a very logical code, France (FR), the Netherlands (NL) or the United Kingdom (UK) for example. But what about Germany? What does the DE country code stand for?
Since 1947 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a non-governmental association based in Switzerland, has been responsible for determining international standards in technology and manufacturing.
While you might not be familiar with the ISO, you will be familiar with their work. It is thanks to the organisation that certain abbreviations can be understood across the world. Perhaps the most famous example of these abbreviations is country codes, also known as the ISO 3166 classification.
The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 classification assigns two-letter country codes to 165 countries. Most people are familiar with certain, logical two-letter country codes, such as the United States (US) and Denmark (DK).
Other codes are more confusing and could be mistaken for English names for a different country, such as Switzerland (CH) or Croatia (HR). The Swiss country code refers to Confoederatio helvetica, the Latin name for the Swiss Confederation and Croatia’s HR refers to Hrvatska, the Croatian word for Croatia.
The ISO’s country code for Germany is DE. While the logic of this may be obvious to those familiar with Germany or who are learning German, it may be confusing for outsiders.
DE is short for Deutschland, the German word for Germany. The alternative logical codes for Germany, GE, GR or GY, are taken by Georgia, Greece and Guyana respectively.
Bar a few countries, the ISO 3166 classification is also used to create domain names used on the internet. That's why .de is the domain for websites based in Germany.
These domain names are formally known as country code top-level domains or ccTLDs and are the two letters you see at the end of an internet address, e.g. iamexpat.de, bundesregierung.de or berlin.de.
After .cn, China’s country code top-level domain, .de is the ccTLD with the most registered addresses in the world, .uk follows with the third-highest number of registrations. In 1988, the University of Dortmund address uni-dortmund.de became the first .de registered domain.
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