ICANN Acronyms and Terms
L
label
The segments that are separated by dot characters in a domain name. For example, the name gnso.icann.org consists of three labels: gnso, icann, and org. Each label in the name, when read from first to last, represents a subdomain of the label that follows it. For example, the labels in the name gnso.icann.org indicate that gnso is a subdomain of the icann domain, and icann is a subdomain of the org domain.
In the early days of the Domain Name System (DNS), labels could be composed only of characters from the Latin alphabet (a to z), European-Arabic digits (0 to 9), and the hyphen (-). The DNS now supports Internationalized Domain Names, which allow labels to include characters from other alphabets (e.g., Arabic and Cyrillic) and languages (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Korean).