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Comment by alexchamberlain

7 months ago

Right, but confusingly, GB is the ISO 2 code for the United Kingdom, even though the United Kingdom is much bigger than Great Britain, where the GB abbreviation comes from.

Pet hate: Regularly running into dropdowns that list countries by name, but sort them by country code.

  • Thanks for explaining where that apparently random ordering comes from - drives me nuts too!

At least for the identification sticker / stripe on cars we've moved from GB to UK. Maybe we'll just move to uk as the ISO 2 letter code.

Makes sense, also in keeping with the excessively complicated naming that thousands of years of dispute produces.