They are similar to the three-digit country codes developed and maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division, from which they originate in its UN M.49 standard.
They were first included as part of the ISO 3166 standard in its second edition in 1981, but they were released by the United Nations Statistics Division since as early as 1970.
For people and systems using non-Latin scripts (such as Arabic or Japanese), the English alphabet may be unavailable or difficult to use, understand, or correctly interpret.
While numeric codes overcome the problems of script dependence, this independence comes at the cost of loss of mnemonic convenience.
The following numeric codes have been withdrawn from ISO 3166-1:[7] The following numeric codes were also assigned by the United Nations Statistics Division, but these territories were never officially included in ISO 3166-1:[1] In the UN M.49 standard developed by the United Nations Statistics Division, additional numeric codes are used to represent geographical regions and groupings of countries and areas for statistical processing purposes, but these codes are not included in ISO 3166-1.