North Korea, Korea DPR or Democratic People's Republic? What every country in the world is really called

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/26/country-names-north-south-korea

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Think you know geography? Presumably the person responsible for the "human error" which saw South and North Koreas' flags mixed up at a preliminary Olympic football match last night thought the same.

London 2012 organisers have apologised and blamed human error for Wednesday's flag mix-up when South Korea's flag appeared alongside North Korea's women's football team on stadium screens as players warmed up before their opening match.

How did it happen? We deal with country flags and names all the time so we perhaps have more sympathy than most when it comes to country names and details. At the Guardian, we call North Korea just that. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) calls it DPR (which stands for Democratic People's Republic of) Korea and South Korea just Korea. Confusingly South Korea's official name - according to the ISO, which makes rules about these things - is Republic of Korea.

And we're not talking about language differences: even in English, countries have different names. Which all adds up to make it difficult for us to draw maps. It also explains why country codes are so important to data journalism - and the IOC has its own codes too, just to confuse things.

Here's some recurring ones:<br />• Plurinational State Of Bolivia (Bolivia)<br />• Brunei Darussalam (Brunei)<br />• Congo (Congo-Brazzaville)<br />• Democratic Republic Of The Congo, The Democratic Republic Of The<br />• Côte D'ivoire (Ivory Coast)<br />• Myanmar (Burma)<br />• Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (Libya)

So, just to help out - especially if you're on London Olympic flag duty today - here's our definitive list of country official names, what the IOC calls them - and what the Guardian style says we should call them.

And we haven't even started on Team GB - which should really be called Team GB and Northern Ireland. If you're being precise, this is really the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - or, as we call it here, the UK.

In case you get stuck, here's the most up-to-date map of the world we have:

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SOURCE: IOC, ISO, GUARDIAN STYLE GUIDE

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