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

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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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D

  • domain name

    A unique name that forms the basis of the uniform resource locators (URLs) that people use to find resources on the Internet (e.g., web pages, email servers, images, and videos). The domain name itself identifies a specific address on the Internet that belongs to an entity such as a company, organization, institution, or individual. For example, in the URL https://www.icann.org/public-comments, the domain name icann.org directs a browser to the ICANN organization’s domain. The rest of the URL directs the browser to a specific resource on the www server within ICANN’s domain (in this case, the Public Comments page on the ICANN org website).

    A domain name consists of two or more textual segments separated by dots. For example, in the domain name icann.org, the first part of the name, icann, represents a second-level domain within the top-level domain org. Domain names can also have more than two segments, as in bbc.co.uk. In this example, bbc represents a subdomain within the second-level domain co, which resides in the top-level domain uk.