All Domain names for over 30 years have been make exclusively out of the English alphabet, numbers and hyphens. That’s alright for English speakers and readers, but that is actually less than 25% of the worlds population! This has been one of the few factors limiting growth of the internet.

An Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) is an internet address that contains characters outside of the English alphabet, for example from Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, and many more. For example:

• English – internationaldomainname.ws
• Spanish – vehículo.ws
• Arabic – مركبة.ws
• Russian – автомобиль.ws

IDNs allow everyone in the world to access the Internet in their native language.

With IDNs, anyone, anywhere in the world, can register a domain name that allows visitors to access web sites in their native language and character set.

Pretty simple, eh?

Karen Megge

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Click here to watch a short video about IDNs!
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