This is a pointless observation I’ve made (others have too, probably) which I think could be just the thing for the SDMB.
The ISO currency code for the Russian ruble is RUB. This looks unimpressive until you realise that the first two letters in an ISO currency code always represent the country, and the third letter is then for the currency. So the RU in RUB doesn’t stand for ruble, it stands for Russia. It just happens to work out, by a fortunate coincidence, that these letters are also the first two letters in the name of the currency, so a B could be added to make the code look like the name of the currency.
Another, less clear, example is EUR, where the EU stands, of course, for European Union, and an R could be added to go for the name of the currency. I’m saying this example is less clear because here, the name of the currency is, of course, basedon the same name for the continent that the European Union got its name from, whereas in the case of the ruble, that word has nothing to do with the name for Russia.
Are there other examples for such serendipitous currency codes?
Among other things, it says that when picking the codes, there’s actually a goal of making them work like RUB or EUR does. Can’t always succeed, but they try. So the “just happen to” part of your title is not quite apt.
That article also has the complete list of currently-used codes. Scanning that I don’t see any others meeting the OP’s criteria. Mostly because so many country codes don’t have a vowel in the right place, and/or the country name and currency name start with different letters.
But I did learn that LSL is the code for the Lesotho Loti. Which is one of the very few places I’ve encountered my namesake acronym in use.
No. But after bumping into the Loti I hit the wiki disambiguation page for “LSL” and was surprised to see a couple other entries I recognized from times past but had never put together with my moniker.
I did notice the “Linden Scripting Language” entry and being a former dev I was curious what that was, and so learned about Second Life. Which heretofore I had only ever heard the name of with not much idea about what it was.
The actual source of my moniker has a wiki entry but did not make the disambiguation page.
Side question: What about airport names? Why are they sometimes seemingly mnemonic, like BOS or MIA, while other times more inscrutable, like ORD or POO?
O’Hare began as a manufacturing plant for Douglas C-54 Skymasters during World War II and adjoining Douglas Field Airport.[21] The site was originally known as a small German-American farming community known as Orchard Place.
Douglas Company’s contract ended with the war’s conclusion. Douglas considered building airliners at Orchard but chose to concentrate civil production at its headquarters in Santa Monica, California.[11] With the departure of Douglas, the complex took the name Orchard (Douglas) Airport, and was assigned the IATA code ORD.
'Zactly. In most cases where the IATA is a real headscratcher, it’s comes from the (prior?) name of the airport, not the city it’s associated with. Another good example is in Louisville KY where the main airport is SDF. Which makes sense once you know its proper name is “Standiford Field”.
The other common cause of confusion is that IATA got started in the 1940s just after WWII and assigned a code to every prominent city in the world. Which led to a bunch of sensible mnemonic codes going to places most Americans have never heard of. And so when some minor 2nd or 3rd tier US city finally got air service in the 1960s or 1980s, the most obvious code for their name had long ago been assigned to someplace far far away.
It’s not what the OP is looking for, but I quite like that the code for the Bolivian boliviano is BOB. Like the British slang for a shilling. (Is “bob” still used in the UK since decimalisation?)
Continuing this hijack, in other cases, it’s because of restrictions in the use of certain letters. In the US, airports are strongly discouraged from using codes that begin with K, N, and W (and maybe another letter that I can’t think of). That’s why we’ve got EWR for Newark and BNA for Nashville.
Or the city built a new airport and the logical mnemonic code was already assigned to the old airport. That’s the case for Sacramento – the city built a new airport in the late 1960s to replace the old airport that was hemmed in by development. Since SAC was already assigned to the old airport, which is still in use as a GA airport, the new airport had to use SMF (Which officially stands for Sacramento Metropolitan Field, even though the airport hasn’t been called that for decades).
Yeah. DEN is the exception that proves the rule. When they built the new Denver airport they wanted to shut down the older Stapleton and transfer the identifier DEN to it.
The IT SNAFUs that created were legendary. “Never again” was the hue and cry from nearly everybody in the industry. Only a few suits at the Denver city government thought it was a great decision.
Sometimes, when a city builds a new airport, the code of the old airport is transferred to the new one. This happened e.g. when the new Munich airport was opened in 1992.
That only works if they close the old airport, though. They did do that with DEN, too, as @LSLGuy already mentioned. The reason they couldn’t do it in Sacramento was because the old airport is still open as a general aviation airport, and still has the code SAC assigned to it to this day.
Then there’s the Canadian airport codes. Most of them begin with “Y”, because the federal government in the 30s used that in combination iwth the traditional railway code for a city to indicate that it had a weather station: “Y” for “Yes”. When the international system was being set up, Canada claimed “Y” as the initial letter for Canadian airports.
The “K” prefix is really invisibly there for the 3-letter airport codes for continental US airports (it’s P for Hawaii and Alaska). Boston is really KBOS, Kennedy really is KJFK, etc. the N prefix, IIRC, was for naval installations.
Which means that the Keene, NH airport has the 3-letter EEN, which turns into KEEN. New Bedford, MA airport is EWB, which makes no sense unless you skip the initial N and just keep rolling into the city name.
Then you get Newport, RI with UUU - which I’ve never understood.
We now return to our regularly scheduled thread about currency.
Almost all the ISO codes work that way, but that’s not what the OP is asking for. The examples they gave are where the full 3 letter code looks like an abbreviation for the currency unit alone, without the country name: RUB for “ruble” and “EUR” for “euro”. I don’t think there are any others besides those two that work like that.
