A "country code" is a short series of letters or numbers that represent a specific country or territory. These codes are used in various contexts, such as internet domain names, international telephone dialing, and vehicle registration. For example, the country code for the United States is "US," while Canada uses "CA." In the context of the internet, country codes are part of the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard, which assigns two-letter codes to each country. This helps in identifying the origin of websites, such as ".uk" for the United Kingdom or ".jp" for Japan.