Some more silly Punycode domain names

You know how it is, you buy one silly domain name and then you get an idea for loads more! A few weeks ago, I got https://⏻.ga/ - I think I'm the first person to get a domain name which uses a glyph from the Miscellaneous Symbols Unicode block. How exciting!

And that got me wondering… what other abuses of the Punycode algorithm can I whack into DNS? Well, here's some I whipped up using FreeNom - they offer free domain names on the .ga TLD (and a few others) and are very liberal in accepting Punycode domains.

There's millions of domains all under one roof

For some reason, the children's retailer "Toys 'R' Us" uses a backwards R in their logo. Presumably because they think kids are stupid and don't know how to form letters.

Or, maybe they're big fans of the reversed letter ᴙ? Either way, Punycode supports that!

I present to you:

https://ToysᴙUs.ga/

Yup! Copy and paste that and it'll work. Webkit based browsers should show the ᴙ in the URl bar - others might show Punycode.

NB: This is not the Cyrillic ya - it is, instead, a homoglyph.

Touch a Touch a Touch a Touch Me

I think this is the world's first domain name written in Braille.

https://⠠⠃⠗⠇.ga

That uses Unified English Braille - with a Grade Two contraction.

Interestingly, I couldn't get any browser to display Braille in the URl bar. The other domains on this page work - but this one just gave the Punycode representation xn--9iii1c8a.ga

These domains go up to 11

Without a doubt, the loudest band in rock and/or roll are the legendary "Spın̈al Tap" - note the dotless I and the heavy-metal umlaut over the N.

Again, Punycode supports that!

https://Spın̈alTap.ga/

Interestingly, this was the only domain that Firefox displayed without converting to Punycode.

Some kind of Einstein

This one combines another trick. As I pointed out in my post about buying a single character domain name, we can abuse Unicode normalisation in our domain names. So the Unicode Superscript block gets automatically converted to regular text.

This means we can have a domain of:

https://e꞊mc².ga/

The "equals" is really "modifier letter short equals sign (U+A78A)" which, surprisingly, doesn't undergo normalisation.

What didn't work

It's always good to share the experiments which didn't produce anything useful. Negative results are results too!

• Zalgo Text doesn't work.
• 🂡 and other playing cards don't work.
• I figured trying to use something like xn--hsbccom-oy9d61a would probably get me banned from the Internet pretty quickly!
• This didn't open up a portal to the Dark Dimension from which all madness stems. Oh well.

Up next?

If you manage to generate any weird and wonderful domain names, please leave a comment.