IDN Domains + Symbol Domains 101 (Update!)
**UPDATE** This blog entry was retracted from last Friday to clarify the point of the article and to verify facts that some of our readers brought to our attention (thanks for your patience in getting this re-posted!). It was not our intent to mislead the public, nor was it to indicate specific demand, usage or value of IDN’s or symbol IDNs.
With today’s updated blog post, we have also shared important information about IDNA 2008 and the fact that symbol domains will stop working with the latest IDN specifications.
For more detailed knowledge on IDNs, we encourage you to paruse this list of helpful resources (please share any others we may not know about):
There are also informative symbol domain forum threads you can join in on to better understand symbol domains and their value from peers:
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Post from Friday, April 30th with revisions implemented:
At dinner with friends the other night, one asked why he had never seen emicons used in domain names considering their popularity in messaging. Think about it… Sacred Heart Hospital could use a heart symbol, Seattle Mariners could use a sad-face, etc. After losing them in explanation of ASCII-Punycode translation and IDN’s, I decided the quick way out of the conversation was that they could not be used very easily by most users and left it at that. It sparked my curiosity about symbol domains and discovered that they will continue to exist (as the xn--version) but will stop rendering correctly with IDNA 2008.
Here are some great definitions with credit attributred to Unicode.org
’s Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) FAQs:
What is an IDN Domain Name?
Domain names, such as “macchiati.blogspot.com”, were originally designed only to support ASCII characters. In 2003, a specification was released that allows most Unicode characters to be used in domain names. IDNs are supported by all modern browsers and email programs, so people can use links in their native languages, such as http://Bücher.de.
What Happens When an IDN Domain Name is Registered?
Most domain name registrars have a special page for International Domain Name (IDN) registration.One important thing to note is that you have to choose the language of the domain name and you cannot mix languages/scripts within a domain name.Mixing scripts in a single domain is not allowed due to security problems where the letters in one script look very much like the letters form another. For example, if someone is able to create exampl℮.com (that final “℮” is the estimated symbol, not “e”) they could convince people to visit their site rather than example.com
Do IDNs change the Domain Name System (DNS)?
No. Internally, the non-ASCII Unicode characters are transformed into a special sequence of ASCII characters. So as far as the DNS system is concerned, all domain names are just ASCII.
What are some examples of interesting Symbol IDN Domain Names?
We ran across the IDNS for COM/NET/ORG/INFO/BIZ/US and found a list of 10,386 domains which are a single ‘character’. Here is a sampling of some of the most fun symbol IDNs we came across. Again, this is simply a fun list we came across that we wanted to share. Please note our IDNA2008 in reference to symbol IDN domain names rendering.
࿊.com xn--3gd.com
♞.net xn--85h.net
☂.com xn--m3h.com
☎.com xn--y3h.com
☼.net xn--94h.net
☠.net xn--h4h.net
☮.com xn--v4h.com
࿉.net xn--2gd.net
✂.com xn--xbi.com
☺.com xn--74h.com
✿.net xn--odi.net
♫.com xn--m6h.com
⇔.net xn--17g.net
℞.net xn--u2g.net
♡.com xn--c6h.com
✌.com xn--7bi.com
☃.net xn--n3h.net
✎.com xn--9bi.com
✆.com xn--1bi.com
✈.com xn--3bi.com
What is IDNA 2008 and How does it Impact Symbol Domains?
IDNA 2008 disallows about eight thousand characters that used to be valid, including all uppercase characters, full/half-width variants, symbols,and punctuation. It also interprets four characters differently.