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Why is Ireland's ccTLD .ie?

2 points by kaishiro ↗ HN
While discussing ccTLDs with a few friends, we realized that Ireland's ccTLD is .ie. In digging in a little further, we discovered that the ccTLDs were originally assigned based on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes assigned in '74 - something which I never knew but makes perfect sense. So it follows on that Ireland's .ie TLD stems from it's ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code also being IE. I also understand that Ireland originally went by the name Eire. But what I still can't figure out is why Ireland's original ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 designation wasn't .ei instead of .ie?

I've dug around as much as I can but I'm now at a loss - hoping someone has some historical information as to how this came about.

[EDIT] - Just to add to this, one thing I just found out was that a historical name of Ireland was "Inis Ealga" ("Noble Island") - via https://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/739995. This is the first reference I've seen to any name that could possible align with IE. It's tenuous obviously, but thought it worth adding.

10 comments

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tiernano
im going to make a guess that because Eire is the "Irish" of the the name, and most of the rest of the domains are based on the English of the name... since the ISO standard name for Ireland is IE, that would make sense... Also, look at the UK... the official ISO code for that is GB, but they use UK for their ccTLD...
kaishiro
Yeah, I did notice that actually - and apparently it's because the UK asked ISO to place UK on the "Exceptionally Reserved" list - which is interesting in and of itself. What I don't understand is why they decided to go with IE/.ie instead of the (seemingly) more obvious EI/.ei,

I know how ultimately inconsequential this is - it's really just a curiosity that I can't get my head around.

CLPadvocate
I think UK is a different issue - GB (England + Wales + Scotland) is not the same as UK (GB + Nothern Ireland).
Someone
Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_vehicle_registra..., they abolished EIR in favor of IRL as vehicle registration code in 1992.

Possibly, if you find why they did that, you have your answer (¿possibly because they didn’t want to choose between the Irish and English names of the country, just as ISO was picked as abbreviation for “International Organization for Standardization”?)

The ‘logical’ two letter equivalent would be IR, but I guess that was taken by Iran.

mytailorisrich
It might as simple as: IR is Iran (bigger country and follows UN designation so did not want to change). Next letter after 'r' in 'Ireland' is 'e'. 'ie'.

Edit: And that ties with "Inis Ealga" mentioned by OP. So it must be one or the other, or both.

Normille
I suppose you could backronym it to mean Ireland/Eire, if you wanted.

Funny. I've never really wondered about this before [and I'm Irish!] but now you've got me puzzling too.

IR not being available [Iran] the next most logical would seem to be:

.EI --Éire

.ER --could also work for Éire

.RI --Republic of Ireland [Official name of the country in English]

.PE --Poblacht na hÉireann [Official name of the country in Irish]

I've never heard of Inis Eagla by the way. Must be very obscure.

If someone fancies asking the .ie official registrar, on the off-chance they actually know, their Twitter account is at @IEDR_dot_ie [I'm not on Twitter, so I can't do it]

kaishiro
Oh wow, the dual meaning of Ireland/Eire for .ie is actually a really interesting take that I hadn't considered before.

Thanks for the suggestion as well - it's a good one. I'll send them a message shortly.

In the meantime, I actually reached out directly to ISO yesterday re: this and actually received the following reply last night:

"Dear kaishiro,

By way of reply, I'm bringing your query to the attention of the Secretariat for the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, which perhaps may have some historical information to offer on the subject.

Best regards"