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ICANN Acronyms and Terms

ICANN has hundreds of acronyms and terms, which can be confusing. We created this multilingual tool to help explain what these terms mean and facilitate your work within the ICANN community.

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ICANN Acronyms and Terms

Type in the acronym or term you are looking for in the Search bar below.
In addition to English, translated versions of acronyms and terms are also available in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish. Links for each language are located in the top right of the page.
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Do you have feedback on the definitions or the terms? Send us an email to: acronymsandterms@icann.org.

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).