Terminology

BIN - Buy It Now. Traditionally used to quickly put an end to an auction before it starts. This allows a buyer to bypass an auction process by accepting the “Buy It Now” price (usually a lot higher than opening bids are).

C’s and V’s – C stands for consonant and V stands for vowel. People will use these for specific letter-based domains. For example – CVCV would be a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel domain.

C – C also stands for “character”. Used to describe any alphanumeric character. For example, a CCC domain is a domain with 3 alphanumeric characters in it – each C can be a letter or a number. Mainly used to generalize a series of domains.

ccTLD - Country Coded Top Level Domain. These are TLDs assigned to based out of countries. They are traditionally based on the country’s native, or most common, language. Some examples are .us (United States), .de (Germany (Deutschland)), .au (Australia).

Cybersquatting - is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.

.com (commercial) – is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) used on the Internet’s Domain Name System. It was one of the original top-level domains (TLDs, the other five being .edu, .gov, .mil, .net and .org) established in January 1985, and has grown to be the largest TLD in use.

Domain Name – is an identification label to define a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet, based on the Domain Name System (DNS).

Domain hack – is an unconventional domain name that combines domain levels, especially the top-level domain (TLD), to spell out the full “name” or title of the domain, making a kind of pun.

Domainers – People who buy and sell domain names are known as domainers.

Domain name transfer – A Domain name transfer is the process of changing the designated registrar of a domain name

Domain slamming – is a form of scam in which an internet service provider (ISP) or domain name registrar attempts to trick customers of different companies into switching from their existing ISP/registrar to the scamming ISP/registrar, under the pretense that the customer is simply renewing their subscription to their old ISP/registrar.

DNS – The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical naming system for computers, services, or any resource participating in the Internet.

DNS - Domain Name Server. This is a service that tells browsers where to look for your domain. It is traditionally stored with the registry or registrar.

DD - DynaDot – a popular registrar.

DN – Domain Name. The main reason why you’re on this forum.

DNF - Domain Name Forum. If you don’t know this one then why are you here?

DNF$ – DNForum.com fake money. Used to purchase decorations to names, upgraded memberships, or sometimes even used to pay for products and/or services.

Domain appraisal – is an estimate about the potential sales price of a particular Internet domain name. Domain name appraisals are highly speculative. It is an estimate and an opinion, and can considerably vary depending upon the considered elements of the name and its extension. Traffic to and revenue from a web is not relevant to a domain, but to the web content. It is a common mistake to take web traffic and revenue into calculation of a domain.

FWD - Forward. This is used to forward all traffic from one domain to another. If people type in the forwarding domain name, it will redirect them to the other name.

G – Usually stands for Google (also regerred to “The G”, “Big G” etc..). Google is the most commonly used search engine. They also offer pay-per-click advertisements though their AdSense program.

GD - GoDaddy. One of the most popular registrars. GoDaddy offers domain registrations, email services, hosting, and parking pages.

gTLD – A generic top-level domain (gTLD) is one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use on the Internet.

GUI - Graphical User Interface. Something that allows a user to interface with a computer in a graphical environment. While MS-DOS is a UI, Windows XP is a GUI.
ICANN – is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, United States, ICANN is a non-profit corporation that was created on September 18, 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

IDN – An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many non-English languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese or Hindi.ccTLD – country code top-level domains
L’s and N’s – L’s stand for letters, N’s stand for numbers. When people want to talk about a class of domains, or shorter domains, they’ll use L’s and N’s. for example – if someone is talking about an LLL.com they are talking about .com domains that only have 3 letters.

MS – Microsoft (also known as M$). A software company who has given us programs like Microsoft Windows, MS DOS, and Microsoft Office. They also provide server and networking based OS’s (Windows NT, Exchange Server, etc..).

OS – Operating System. The system that allows a UI (or GUI) for a computer. Most commonly used is MS Windows but people also use Macintosh’s OS, Linux, and a few others.

PM - Private Message. A message sent to people and only the sender and receiver(s) can see it.

PP - Pay Pal – a common method of payment. This allows people to send money electronically to other people. No escrow is used with this service – once you hit send the other person has the money.

PPC - Pay Per Click. It’s simple – someone clicks on an ad, you get paid. This advertisement style is commonly used with parking companies (Sedo, Parked) and ad-feed programs like AdSense.

Reg Fee – Registration Fee. The amount of money it costs to register and / or renew a domain. Typically ranges from $4 – $1000 but can vary due to the registrar, the TLD / ccTLD being registered or renewed, and discount codes. Also used in the appraisal forums to state that the domain has little to no value.

Registrar-Lock – is a status code that can be set on an Internet domain name by the sponsoring registrar of the domain name.

Reverse domain hijacking – The term reverse domain hijacking refers to the practice of acquiring domain names from owners by accusing them of violating trademarks with the domain name, and demanding that the domain be transferred.

SEO – Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.

Single-letter second-level domains – are domain names in which the second-level domain consists of only one letter, such as x.org. Such domains are rare, due to the fact that on December 1, 1993, The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority explicitly reserved all single-letter and single-digit second-level domain names in the top-level domains .com, .net, and .org. This was done in case the registries for these domains became overloaded. In December 2005, ICANN considered auctioning off their domains.

SLD – In the Domain Name System (DNS) hierarchy, a second-level domain (SLD) is a domain that is directly below a top-level domain (TLD). For example, in wikipedia.org, Wikipedia is the second-level domain of the .org TLD.

TLD - Top level domain. Some examples include .com, .net, .org. This dictates which registry your domain goes though and can play a lot on domain values.

TLDs – A top-level domain or domain name (TLD) is the highest level of domain names in the root zone of the Domain Name System of the Internet.

Type-in traffic – is a term describing visitors landing at a web site by entering a keyword or phrase (with no spaces or a hyphen in place of a space) in the web browser’s address bar.

URLs – In computing, a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) consists of a string of characters used to identify or name a resource on the Internet.
UI – User Interface. Something that allows a human to interface with a computer. Operating systems and programs are all examples of UI’s.

WHOIS – is a query/response protocol which is widely used for querying an official database in order to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address, or an autonomous system number on the Internet.

WIPO – The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is one of the 16 specialized agencies of the United Nations. WIPO was created in 1967 “to encourage creative activity, to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world”.
WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get. A common acronym for program to create documents and web pages. Little programming is needed and allows you to drag and drop what you need to where. Traditionally WYSIWYG editors are very easy to use but can be cumbersome on a browser.

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