Consulting Journal: Writing

Writing: Country names

by David Blakey

Should you use a country's name or an abbreviation?

[Monday 16 May 2005]

Consultants' reports often need to include lists of countries and cities.

We have similar clients in Britain, France and America.
We have similar clients in London, Paris and New York.

Sometimes they abbreviate the names. I do not know why they abbreviate the names, and I can think of no reason why they should, but they do.

We have similar clients in the UK, France and US.
We have similar clients in London, Paris and NYC.

This looks bad when some names are not abbreviated. Mixing abbreviations with full names looks worse when more of them are used.

We have similar clients in Dallas, NY, Chicago and SF.

My advice is to always use the full name, or, in the case of countries, one of their conventional names. Countries may have a variety of names.

United States of America	United States	America
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland	United Kingdom	Britain
French Republic	France	France

Always use the equivalent name for all countries in your lists. Even if you know the two-letter abbreviation for France, do not use it.

If the list consists only of America and Britain, some people write them as the US and UK. I prefer to avoid abbreviations entirely.

For lists that include abbreviations of state names, I prefer to omit a comma between the town or county and the state, as in Bristol NY, Bristol NH and Bristol RI.

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