vocabulary: - term: country definition: > A nation or territory with distinct political boundaries, recognized by international standards. The REST Countries API covers 250+ countries and dependent territories. related: - sovereign - dependency - territory - term: alpha_2 definition: > ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two-letter country code (e.g., "US" for United States, "DE" for Germany). The most widely-used short-form country identifier. standard: ISO 3166-1 - term: alpha_3 definition: > ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 three-letter country code (e.g., "USA", "DEU"). Less ambiguous than alpha_2 and preferred in many data systems. standard: ISO 3166-1 - term: ccn3 definition: > ISO 3166-1 numeric three-digit country code (e.g., "840" for the United States). Used in systems requiring purely numeric identifiers. standard: ISO 3166-1 - term: fips definition: > Federal Information Processing Standards country code, maintained by the US government for geopolitical entities. standard: FIPS 10-4 - term: cioc definition: > International Olympic Committee country code, used to identify nations in Olympic competition contexts. - term: fifa definition: > FIFA country code used to identify national football/soccer associations and their member teams. - term: gec definition: > Geopolitical Entities and Codes (GEC, formerly FIPS 10-4) country code maintained by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. - term: aggregate definition: > A named bundle of related searchable country properties. The API supports two aggregates: "name" (bundles all name fields) and "code" (bundles all code fields), enabling single-query cross-field searches. values: - name - code - term: region definition: > Major continental or geographic grouping assigned to a country. One of: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania, or Antarctic. values: - Africa - Americas - Asia - Europe - Oceania - Antarctic - term: subregion definition: > A more granular geographic sub-grouping within a region, such as "Northern America", "Western Europe", or "South-Eastern Asia". - term: landlocked definition: > Boolean indicating whether a country has no coastline (no access to any ocean or sea). Examples: Switzerland, Bolivia, Mongolia. - term: borders definition: > Array of ISO alpha-3 codes for countries sharing a land border with this country. - term: sovereign definition: > A self-governing, internationally recognized independent state. Most UN member states are sovereign countries. - term: dependency definition: > A territory that is not fully independent but is administered by or associated with a sovereign state (e.g., overseas territories, crown dependencies). - term: dependency_type definition: > The type of dependent relationship a territory has with its parent sovereign state. values: - crown_dependency - overseas_territory - autonomous_region - special_administrative_region - freely_associated_state - term: iso_status definition: > ISO 3166 classification of the country entry. "official" means the country is formally assigned a code by ISO. "user_assigned" means the code is in a range reserved for user-defined entities. values: - official - user_assigned - term: demonym definition: > The word used to describe a person from a particular country or region (e.g., "American" for the United States, "German" for Germany). The API provides masculine (m) and feminine (f) forms by language code. - term: gini_coefficient definition: > A statistical measure of income or wealth inequality within a country, ranging from 0 (perfect equality) to 100 (perfect inequality). The API stores historical measurements keyed by year. - term: calling_code definition: > International telephone dialing prefix required to reach a country, prefixed with "+" (e.g., "+1" for the United States, "+49" for Germany). - term: tld definition: > Country-code Top-Level Domain: the internet domain suffix assigned to a country (e.g., ".us", ".de", ".jp"). - term: response_fields definition: > Query parameter accepting a comma-separated list of field names that allowlists which country properties are returned, reducing response size. - term: response_fields_omit definition: > Query parameter accepting a comma-separated list of field names that blocklists which country properties are excluded from the response. - term: pagination definition: > The REST Countries API uses offset-based pagination. Clients control page size via the "limit" parameter (1-100, default 25) and navigate pages via the "offset" parameter. The "meta.more" field indicates whether additional records exist. - term: membership definition: > Boolean flags on each country indicating participation in international organizations such as the UN, EU, NATO, G7, G20, BRICS, OPEC, ASEAN, and others. - term: premium_field definition: > Certain data fields (notably "leaders" and some classification data) are only accessible on paid API plans. Attempting to access premium fields on a free plan returns a 403 Forbidden response. - term: demo_key definition: > A special API key "rc_live_demo" that returns sample API responses without requiring account registration, intended for testing and exploration. - term: fiscal_year_start definition: > The date on which a country's fiscal (financial) year begins for government, corporate, and personal accounting purposes. - term: driving_side definition: > Whether vehicles in this country drive on the left or right side of the road. values: - left - right - term: start_of_week definition: > The conventional first day of the calendar week in a given country (typically "monday" in Europe/most of the world, "sunday" in the US). - term: eu_region_endpoint definition: > Business plan customers can route requests to an EU-hosted regional instance for data residency compliance purposes.