Countries

This documents the methods and data about countries referred to on this wiki.

When entering information for Countries generally use the ISO 3166-1 standard two-letter abbreviations in caps. These are used in URL domain name suffixes (.us or .se etc) and in some contexts on Wikipedia.

See different, lower case, two-letter abbreviations for Languages.

The common cases on this wiki are

• AU: Australia
• AR: Argentina
• AT: Austria, though it was in the Austro-Hungarian empire
• AH: we use AH for Austria-Hungary; not 3166 standard, and it's not clear what to do for some patents about which we have little info.
• BE: Belgium
• BR: Brazil
• BG: Bulgaria (rare, maybe not independent in this period
• CA: Canada
• CH: Switzerland (from an old Roman abbreviation)
• CL: Chile
• CN: China (rare), which temporarily includes Cochinchina although that should probably be eallocated to VN, Viet Nam; does espacenet use CN or VN or FR for that one?
• CU: Cuba
• DK: Denmark
• DE: Deutschland (Germany)
• DZ: Algeria (from Berber/Arabic name "Dzayer" دزاير)
• EG: Egypt
• ES: Spain
• FI: Finland (rare)
• FR: France
• GB: Great Britain, and still the standard abbreviation for the current UK
• GR: Greece; but the language is abbreviated el
• HU: Hungary, part of AH then but a useful concept/category sometimes
• IN: India (not independent then, but useful), rare
• IR: Ireland (rare; used even when not independent because it's a useful category)
• IT: Italy
• JP: Japan
• LU: Luxembourg, which had patents
• LV: Latvia -- part of Russia at the time; a couple of orgs there are worth tracking
• MX: Mexico
• MC: Monaco (rare)
• MA: Morocco (Maroc) (rare)
• NL: Nederlands
• NZ: New Zealand (possibly not an independent country at this time but a useful category)
• NO: Norway
• PT: Portugal
• PY: Paraguay
• RO: Romania, rare
• RU: Russia
• SE: Sweden
• SG: Singapore (rare)
• SU: USSR (rare in our context)
• SL: Slovenia (rare, probably wasn't a country at that time)
• US: United States
• UY: Uruguay
• ZA: South Africa

For unusual cases not listed there, like the earlier principalities of Germany (Prussia, the Kingdom of Saxony (Sachsen), Bavaria ... others will pop up) and Italy, use a term or abbreviation that makes sense and we'll figure it out. List multiple countries if that makes sense, and put semicolons between the abbreviations in a list.

GB is in fact the abbreviation for the UK! We are on track there.

We have meaningful-sized data on maybe 10 countries, and some data on 30! This is going to be good enough to very substantially cover and statistically model each of the big 4 and a sizeable rest-of-world category which can be somewhat compared within itself. But data before 1910 is sketchy on espacenet and we have to ill that in ourselves.

See also our handling of Languages, which have their own codes.

For illustration.

Patents by country in this wiki

Office	Number of items
FR	4,813
US	4,335
GB	3,500
DE	1,097
HU	426
BE	333
AT	300
CA	158
IT	154
CH	136
ES	124
RU	80
AU	55
DK	50
NO	46
MX	44
DEG	29
NL	25
NZ	25
LU	23
IN	14
AR	13
FI	7
SU	5
SE	4
	4
??	3
JP	2
GR	2
CU	2
AH	2