Believe it or not, there was a time when the phrase dot com was not part of the English language. The dominance of that phrase might lead you to believe that the Internet consists of nothing but a bunch of American companies. The phrase is so predominant that if you type a single word into the Location field at the top of your Netscape browser, it will automatically fill in www. at the beginning and .com at the end.

Of course, there are many Internet addresses that do end in something other than .com. Some companies that offer Internet services to their customers use .net at the end of the address, such as the AT&T WorldNet Service (.att.net). Higher education sites in the United States have addresses ending in .edu, such as my own employer, the University of South Florida (.usf.edu). Non-profit organizations can have Internet addresses ending in .org (for example, the USGenWeb's home page is at http://www.usgenweb.org), and U.S. federal government addresses end with .gov, such as the National Archives Web site of http://www.nara.gov. U.S. military sites, less common than the other categories, are .mil sites, and much rarer still are the sites of international organizations using .int addresses, such as the Red Cross.

But what about all of the rest of the sites in the United States that don't quite fit into the scheme above? What about K-12 schools, public libraries, and state and local governments? And what about the rest of the world?

Computers like things to be neat and tidy. But the several hundred countries of the world, which have names that can be spelled a number of different ways depending on what language you are using, and which sometimes take it upon themselves to change their names as the result of political realities, can cause fits to computer databases and communications. Therefore, an international standards body got together and assigned a standard two-letter code to every country; the list rarely changes unless a country splits into two or two countries merge into one.

In most cases, the code assigned to each country is easy for English speakers to guess. The United States has us, Canada has ca, and France has fr. Other code/country combinations may be a bit more confusing. Technically, the standard two-letter code assigned to the United Kingdom is gb (for Great Britain), but for purposes of the Internet, the UK uses uk instead. Australia, not Austria, has au (Austria got at). And .de is not Denmark (which is .dk), but instead is Germany (Deutschland). And .ch is not China (which is .cn), but the land of cheese and chocolate, Switzerland! (OK, so the .ch doesn't actually stand for either cheese or chocolate, but instead for Switzerland's official name, the Swiss Confederation, aka the "Confederatio Helvetica.")

Knowing the meaning of the two-letter country codes can be very useful if you are trying to figure out where a particular Web site is located, or where an individual is probably located who has sent you e-mail. Read the official list (English-language version).

In the United States, addresses ending in .us usually include the two-letter code for the state, as well. For example, information about Florida's state government can be found at http://www.state.fl.us. Most K-12 schools use addresses ending in: the name of the county, k12, the two-letter state code, and finally .us. Many public libraries, city governments, and county governments do something similar. However, because these addresses might be very lengthy (especially when you include the name of the county), some schools, libraries, and local governments use .com or other kinds of addresses instead.

The next time you get a piece of e-mail or visit a Web site, take a moment to examine its address, and see what you can figure out. You may be surprised how much you can learn!

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the "Cybrarian" column. He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.