Domain hunting: 220,000+ domain ideas
Yes, you’ve read it right – I am about to give you more than 220,000 ideas for domain names. And no secrets too…
I stumbled upon this blog entry, which talks about del.icio.us and how the domain name was a part of the success of that site. It also gives a few examples for every country top level domain (TLD). I found the idea very cool, but the list of examlpes rather limited.
And than I thought why not to use a dictionary and some Perl programming to generate more examples. I got the list of country TLDs from this IANA page, edited it a bit with Vim and than used Perl to crossmatch it with the list of words provided by intallation of words-3.0-2.3 on my Linux box (which was based on Moby project).
The result of the script’s ouput is the sorted list of words that match each country’s domain name. You can customize few things as well. Minimum domain length in characters can be specified. Also, you can ignore words that start with or contain some match somewhere in the word. By default, words that contain underscore (‘_’) are ignored.
Here are the files:
- domains.pl – the script itself.
- tlds.txt – list of TLDs for all countries. Edit this file to contain only those countries that you are interested in.
- domains.txt.gz – compressed file with the result of the script run for all countries. This file is roughly 700 KBytes.
- domains.txt – result of the script run for all countries. The file is about 2.5 MBytes. NOTE: download this file only if you’re not going to run the script yourself AND if you don’t have
gzipon your machine.
If after reading all of the above you’re still wondering what I am talking about, here is a little quote from the domains.txt file for Cyprus.
Domains for cy (Cyprus): abbacy abbotcy aberrancy abeyancy abhorrency abnormalcy absorbancy absorbency abstinency abundancy acceptancy accidency accordancy accountancy accumbency accuracy

May 31st, 2005 at 9:02 pm
Interesting extent to my article :) As you said, the examples were rather limited, I was more on suggesting the use of alternative TLD than giving extensive examples.
May 31st, 2005 at 9:37 pm
Heh, I guess that’s my English to blame. I didn’t mean that you did a bad job with examples. I meant that examples were an area which I knew how to improve. :)
Anyway, thanks for the article and for stopping by.
June 2nd, 2005 at 7:31 am
Thanks for the tips… I already have a knack for acquiring domain names before the trend hits.. much to the chagrin of certain companies who will remain nameless.
September 7th, 2005 at 10:22 pm
Very cool. I wrote a script to handles searches on these type of domain names last year. I called them “domain hacks.” Check it out: http://www.domainhacks.com/
September 7th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
Hey Mathew,
Really nice work you did there! Useful, and it looks good too. :)
October 26th, 2005 at 1:45 am
Leonid, I made a suggestion tool using the Moby List, as you have, with a few filtering methods to help users search through the massive number of results. I made my program look at all words and phrases, so I ended up with over 300,000 results. The more common words are highlighted to improve the search effort. Take a look:
http://www.xona.com/domainhacks/suggestions/
October 26th, 2005 at 1:50 am
P.S. I am Matthew’s brother, so I combined my program with his, as you have likely seen, since they are very much related.
October 26th, 2005 at 9:07 am
Jason,
thanks for the info. I’ve checked the link and I think you did some great work over there! This is growing into something really useful and fun to use. :)
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:09 pm
[...] Domain hunting: 220,000+ domain ideas [...]
July 19th, 2007 at 9:19 am
http://www.goodsite.com/31950/hlink It’s a bad link
July 19th, 2007 at 9:19 am
http://www.forumov.net/hlink108/0 cool
http://www.forumov.net/hlink108/1 cool
December 21st, 2007 at 1:12 am
I’ve wrote a page some time ago to generate such names
http://www.domainnamesoup...el.....-names.php
Just choose your extension (.US is good) and it will generate domain names.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Hi, Nice resource you provided.
I am using your tlds.txt for my use
thanks