What Is A TLD Domain Name?

The acronym TLD stands for Top-Level Domain. It refers to a specific part of the string of characters that make up domain names on the Internet, particularly the last part.

For example, all domain names that end in .com are part of the .com TLD. While the .com TLD was originally reserved for American businesses, that rule has not been enforced. The .org TLD was originally reserved for non-profit organizations, but again, the rule is not enforced. However, there are some TLDs that are reserved for specific uses. For example, .mil is reserved for the United States military.

Other TLDs whose use are fairly strictly enforced are country codes, with possibly the exception of the .us and .ca TLDs. For example, the .cn TLD represents Chinese websites. The .ca TLD represents Canadian sites. That does not mean that, for example, Canadian businesses cannot use .com, .org, .biz, .info, or some other TLD. However, the .ca TLD was once split up by province as well. For example, I live in the province of Ontario. There are older websites whose domain name ends .on.ca. These sites are typically government or university websites.

In a similar vein, country code TLDs often allow a specific 2nd-level domain that would normally be a TLD. For example, in the United Kingdom, .com domains are registered as .co.uk. But in China, they are registered as .com.cn. So in the case of the UK, .co is the 2nd-level domain, whereas for China it is .com.

In recent years, many new TLDs have been approved for general release. Many of them are very fashionable, such as the .tv. There’s even a .name TLD, which is intended for those people who wish to register their own name as a website. I’ve only seen a few .name sites to date.

Very recently, a creative use of the .ca and .us TLDs is popping up on the Internet. One example is http://del.icio.us, a very popular social bookmarking site. The idea is simple. Make a list of words that end in either “ca” or “us”, then split up the word into two or three parts.

An example is the word “wondrous”. This could be split into wondro.us or won.dro.us. In the first case, you would register wondro.us. In the second case, you would register dro.us. This would typically translate to http://www.dro.us, but http://dro.us is also allowed, as would http://wondro.us. In the second case, to activate the URL http://won.dro.us, you would have to create the subdomain “won” on on the domain dro.us.

Note: both wondro.us and dro.us are both taken. There are a limited number of words, at least in English, that end in ca or us. So if you want such a domain, you may have to  be creative. The trick is to come up with a 2nd level domain that allows you some flexibility for your subdomains. A different approach is to register a root word but as a .com or some other TLD. For example, you could register drous.com (which is available at the time of this writing). Then you would create the subdomain won to produce won.drous.com.

There are some other options for this sort of domain wordplay if you scour the country code TLDs. Some possibilities are the .at (Austria), .aw (Aruba) and .am (Albania) country code TLDs. Wikipedia has a complete list of all TLDs.

(c) Copyright 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

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