ICANN IDN Glossary

In an attempt to ensure that discussions regarding IDNs take place in a consistent manner ICANN has published an IDN Glossary. The glossary terms can be used freely and is expected to be expanded over time.

Historically, domain names on the Internet were restricted to using a limited set of ASCII characters (i.e. a-z, 0-9 and "-"). However, with the increasing use of the Internet in all regions and by diverse linguistic groups of the world, the demand for multilingual domain names has become more intense. Various acronyms are used widely in communications around internationalizing the domain name space. Explanations for many of these acronyms are provided below to help make this topic simpler to understand.