Federal Information Processing Standards

Acronym: FIPS

From Census Bureau: "Standardized system of numeric and/or alphabetic coding issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the US Department of Commerce. FIPS codes are assigned for a variety of geographic entities including American Indian and Alaska Native Areas, Hawaiian home lands, congressional districts, counties, county subdivisions, metropolitan areas, places and states. The purpose in using FIPS codes is to improve the use of data and avoid unnecessary duplication and incompatibility in the collection, processing and dissemination of data. FIPS codes were discontinued by NIST in 2005, but the Census Bureau continues to maintain and issue codes for the geographic entities covered."