Internet Country Codes Trivia Quiz

Answer: tv

Tuvalu registered .tv as their country code in 1996, choosing it because of its obvious commercial prospects. While .tu, using the first two letters of the country's name, was available and acceptable as usual practice, using the first and third letters (commonly done when the first two are not available for registration) created an incentive for overseas companies to register themselves in Tuvalu, and have a url that ended in the accepted abbreviation for television.

It has been a nice source of income for the government of Tuvalu.

Answer: nz

N for New, Z for Zealand - this code is pretty straightforward. In 2010, the government announced that domain names using the .nz country extension would be able to include macrons in their names, allowing indigenous Māori language words to be used. New Zealand's second-level codes are different from those of many countries: .com is replaced by .co.nz, the .edu for educational institutions was the alternative .ac for academic institutions, for example.

Answer: ne

While you might expect the West African country to use .ni, that code is taken by the Central American country of Nicaragua. And neighbour Nigeria has .ng allocated, so Niger moved on to use the first and fourth letters of its name for the code.

Answer: es

Wait a minute, how does Spain turn into .es? Unlike most of the country codes, Spain's is not based on the English version of the country name, but the Spanish one, España. Followers of the Olympic Games would have encountered this before, as their Olympic three-letter code is ESP. Before 2005, it was very expensive to use this registration, and there were heavy restrictions applied to the second-level domain names that were accepted, so many Spanish companies just used the generic top level codes (such as .com or .net) instead of the specifically Spanish one.

Germany is another country whose code is based on their own language: they use .de from Deutschland.

Answer: ee

Spain uses .es, Ethiopia claims .et, so Estonia went with .ee - from the Estonian name of their country, Eesti. In 2011, the letters that could be used in the names of domains using the .ee extension was expanded to include letters with diacritics, including an umlaut (such as ö), a caron (looking like an inverted ^) and a tilde (such as õ).

This allows use of the full Estonian alphabet.

Answer: id

Here is another example of a code that uses the first and third letters of the country's name, because the .in extension belonged to another country, India. The .id extension was introduced in 1993, for use only by organisations physically based in Indonesia. That requirement has since been relaxed.

Answer: in

India registered .in in 1989, only four years after the first country codes were set up. Originally only a limited number of secondary domains was available, but this was opened up in 2005. In 2018, a new domain manager was appointed who started the introduction of internationalised domain names (ones which use non-Latin characters) so that the nation's many regional languages can use their own script in their domain names.

Answer: se

Why not .sw? Maybe because they wanted to use the Swedish name for the country as the basis, and chose to use the first and last letters of Sverige rather than the first two. For a long time there were no diacritics available for second level domain names, which led to problems when two entities (such as the municipalities of Habo and Håbo, for example) both had to enter their names identically. First to register got it, until an expansion in allowed the use of å, ä, ö, ü and é.

However, for technical reasons many prefer to use their name without the diacritics, and redirect from the site that is reached by those who do type them in the name.

Answer: sz

This is a real stumper until you remember that the country name when the country code was registered was Swaziland. Since multiple countries have names that start with Sw, none of them uses that, but instead they choose a second letter that is unique to them - hence the SZ from Swaziland. Before 2018, the connection was a lot clearer. Entities using the .sz extension must have actual presence in the country, and demonstrate a plan to use it (not just register it to sell on in the market).

Answer: za

My first guess for South Africa was .sa, but that belongs to Saudi Arabia. With 11 official languages, there are a lot of possible names for the country from which to make a choice. However, none of them was selected. The Dutch name of the country, Republiek van Zuid-Afrika, used between 1961 and 1983, leads to the selection of .za.