Every airport in the world is given a three-letter code from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and a four-letter code from International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
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Different kinds of codes have different number of letters. IATA codes for airports have 3 letters, while IATA codes for airlines have two. IATA codes for meals have 4 letters.
ICAO codes have 4 letters because there are so many airports in the world. Usually, the last 3 letters identify the airport domestically, but when searching worldwide you have to use all 4.
With the rapid growth in the aviation industry, in 1947, the identifiers expanded to three letters and LA received an extra letter to become LAX. The letter X does not otherwise have any specific meaning in this identifier.
Three letter combinations gives 263=17576 possible codes. Some airports have multiple codes (ARN = STO, for example). I'm just going to guess that there are more than 17576 airports in the world. Are we reusing these codes?
Codes in the range QAA–QNZ are reserved for aeronautical use; QOA–QQZ for maritime use and QRA–QUZ for all services. Q has no official meaning, but it is sometimes assigned a word with mnemonic value, such as Queen for example in QFE: Queen's field elevation, or Query, Question, reQuest.
ORD – Chicago O'Hare“ORD” is a nod to the airfield's history, which started its life as Orchard Field Airport (OrchaRD) in 1945, at the site where Douglas Corporation had a wartime aircraft assembly plant. That name was short-lived. In 1949 the airport was renamed for Lt. Cmdr.
Meanwhile, airports with reference code 3C have runways of a width of over 24 meters and a length of over 1,200 meters. Such airports can accommodate narrowbody aircraft, including the Airbus A220, Airbus A319, or Airbus A320neo.
There are two entities responsible for allocating codes to airports. The first one is the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which assigns four-letter codes to public and private airports.
For SFO, the most apparent fix was to add on an 'O. ' Hill resolved the mystery in his statement to Bay Curious: “So with SF, they simply took an 'O,' which we can assume was convenient to the fact that San Francisco has an 'O' at the end of it.”
K – United StatesThe prefix K is generally reserved for the contiguous United States. The ICAO codes for these airports are usually the FAA location identifier prefixed with a K. IATA codes are listed where applicable.