An Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) is a domain that includes characters outside the basic Latin alphabet, digits and hyphen, for example münchen.de, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese or Devanagari names. There are also IDN TLDs such as .рф (Russia) and .中国 (China).
Because DNS itself only handles ASCII, IDNs are converted to an ASCII form called punycode, using the IDNA2008 standard. Browsers display the native script when it is safe to do so.
IDNs let people use domains in their own language, but they can be harder to type for international audiences, and some characters look like Latin letters, which creates spoofing (homograph) risks that registries and browsers try to limit.
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Related terms
- Punycode
- Punycode is the encoding that converts Unicode domain names into ASCII-only form starting with "xn--" so they work in the DNS.
- Domain hack
- A domain hack combines the name and TLD to spell a word or phrase, like del.icio.us or youtu.be, creating short, memorable addresses.
- Exact-match domain (EMD)
- An exact-match domain uses the exact keyword phrase people search for, like bestpizzachicago.com, to signal relevance and aid recall.
- Brandable domain
- A brandable domain is a short, unique, pronounceable name, often invented or blended, that can become a distinctive brand, like Spotify or Hulu.