How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name?

A seemingly simple question which sent me down into the murky depths of standards. How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name? It probably isn't sensible to name your online presence a----------hyphen.com - but is there anything technically stopping you?

History

Let's do some history!

This is 1978's "HOST NAMES ON-LINE". Early Internet standards described the - character as "minus" rather than hyphen.

RFC 608

up to 48 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z),

digits (0-9), and the minus sign (-) ... specifically, no blank or space characters allowed;

no distinction between upper and lower case letters;

the first character is a letter;

the last character is NOT a minus sign;

no other restrictions on content or syntax.

So, originally, you could have as many hyphens as you wanted after the first symbol - which had to be a letter. The last symbol had to be a letter or number⁰.

That was later formalised in 1981's "DoD INTERNET HOST TABLE SPECIFICATION"

RFC 810 GRAMMATICAL HOST TABLE SPECIFICATION

<name> ::= <let>[*[<let-or-digit-or-hyphen>]<let-or-digit>]

That's carried in the the slightly more modern RFC 952.

By the time we hit 1987, the word "minus" has gone. Note, there are no restrictions on the number of hyphens - just as long as your domain name doesn't start or end with one¹.

RFC 1035 2.3.1. Preferred name syntax

The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior characters only letters, digits, and hyphen.

By 1989, the "DOMAIN NAMES - IMPLEMENTATION AND SPECIFICATION" was tweaked again:

RFC 1123 2. GENERAL ISSUES

The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal syntax.

And, from then on, things stayed pretty stable until the futuristic year 2010. That was when Internationalised Domain Names (IDN) became available. They use the xn-- string at the start of the name so, the spec now says:

RFC 5891 4.2.3.1. Hyphen Restrictions

The Unicode string MUST NOT contain "--" (two consecutive hyphens) in the third and fourth character positions and MUST NOT start or end with a "-" (hyphen).

What they really mean is that "--" is banned in position 3 & 4 unless the first two characters are "xn"².

So, in theory, you can have up to 59 consecutive hyphens by ensuring that they start in position 4 and end at position 62.

Something like abc---[…]---z.com should be fine.

OR IS IT?!?!?

TLD Restrictions

There's what the RFC's say, and what a Top Level Domain (TLD) will allow. The Registry (the organisation which administers the TLD) may set their own, more restrictive, policies. Some will ban naughty words, or refuse IDN registrations, or prevent impersonation of Public Suffix domain, etc.

For example, South Sudan's .ss policies refuse to allow any hyphens.

Nominet, who run the .uk Registry, don't have any restrictions on the use of hyphens other than refusing to register xn-- domains.

But, in general, you can register multi-hyphened domain names with most Registries.

Anomalies

Of course, the mighty Internet mostly runs on spit and hope³. Naturally there are going to be mistakes, glitches, exceptions, and anomalies.

My delightful friend Q Misell had a rummage through her archives and helped track down some of the domain names which violate the modern rules. It's somewhat difficult to query every domain name, nevertheless, there are hundreds of multi-hyphened domains lurking within DNS.

Some, like ok--computer.com are long dead, but some are still active⁴!

Possibly the most consecutive hyphens belongs to http://a-------------------------------------------------------------a.com/

Sixty-one hyphens! The maximum possible, and it still works! The website looks like it hasn't been updated since it was first registered in 2000.

But what about more modern domains? The spookily named http://zz--icann-monitoring.uk/ was registered in 2024 - long after the rules were updated. But as Nominet doesn't allow xn-- domains, I guess it is fine?

There are some domains like bq--3bhauz7frjrgbka.com which look like they were pseudo-randomly generated. Perhaps as command-and-control servers?

Here's a quick table showing some of the ones Q found:

Domain	Creation Date	Status
0-------------------------------------------------------------0.com	1999	Down
0-------------------------------------------------------------5.com	2001	Live
0---------------------0.com	2000	Live
0----------------0.com	2000	Live
0---------0.com	2000	Live
pr--newswire.org.uk	2005	Down
0o--o0.com	2000	Down
a-----a.net	2000	Down
pr--newswire.uk	2019	Down
uk--domain--names.uk	2019	Live
zz--icann-monitoring.uk	2024	Live
cd--storage-shelves.co.uk	2012	Live
mb--uk.co.uk	2015	Live
o---t.co.uk	2016	Live
om--tat-sat.co.uk	1999	Live
pr--newswire.co.uk	2005	Down
uk--domain--names.co.uk	2000	Down
we--buy--any--car.co.uk	2009	Down
i---i.net	2001	Down
a-------------------------------------------------------------a.com	2000	Live
a---b.com	2000	Down
v---v.net	2000	Down
we--care.net	1999	Down
b---h.com	2001	Down
bq--3bhauz7frjrgbka.com	2000	Down
bq--3bhauz7frjrgbkdcia.com	2000	Down
bq--3cbpcty2rjyq.com	2000	Down
bq--744a.com	2000	Down
bq--abs7czi.com	2000	Down
bq--abxgt4lb.com	2000	Down
bq--azbukkckjavdc.com	2000	Down
bq--azdecny.com	2000	Live
bq--eh7xj73b75xp62x7mh7xgah7ad7xj73b75xa.com	2000	Down
bq--gbbpy2enmnhq.com	2000	Down
bq--gbtfs2a.com	2000	Down
bq--s7z76.com	2000	Down
bq--zzzz.com	2000	Down
c-------7.com	2001	Live
f---you.com	1998	Down
id--design.com	1999	Down
ok--computer.com	2001	Down
t---28.com	2000	Live
t---taz---t.com	2001	Down

Note, "Live" just means an HTTP request returned something. There may, of course, be other services running on that domain, or on subdomains.

So What?

Without a full list of every domain name, it's rather hard to draw firm conclusions. But, in the absence of anything better to do, here are some thoughts.

• Most people don't want multiple consecutive hyphens in their domain names. They're unwieldy but mostly not prohibited.
• If the authors of RFC 5891 had access to a full list of domains, might they have chosen a different syntax for Punycode?
• Why is it so hard to look through every single registered domain name anyway? Even Certificate Logs no longer seem to be easily searchable.
• Are there any other weird restrictions which are violated by older domain names?
• When will DNS finally go all-in with Unicode rather than this kludge? (Probably around the same time as IPv6 adoption!)

If you know of any weird multi-hyphenated domains, please stick a comment in the box 😊