ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

ISO 3166-3

Okay, so let's say you have a group of friends and you want to give them all a special code so you can identify them easily. You decide to use the first letter of their first name followed by the first letter of their last name. That way, if you have two friends named John Smith and Jenny Sanders, their codes will be JS and JS respectively.

Now let's pretend you and your friends decide to move away and live in different countries. Suddenly, the codes you gave them don't work anymore because they only make sense in your old neighborhood. You need new codes that work for every country in the world.

That's where iso 3166-3 comes in! It's like a big book of codes for all the different countries in the world. The codes are made up of three letters, like USA for the United States or JPN for Japan. But sometimes countries change their names, merge with other countries, or split into new countries. When that happens, their code in iso 3166-3 might need to change too.

So basically, iso 3166-3 is a way to make sure everyone in the world has a unique code that can be used to identify their country, no matter what changes happen.