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.de is the country code top-level domain

Country code top-level domain

TLD identifiers are two letters long, and all two-letter top-level domains are ccTLDs. Creation and delegation of ccTLDs is performed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority ...
(ccTLD) for the Federal Republic of Germany. DENIC

DENIC

DENIC Verwaltungs- und Betriebsgesellschaft eG is the manager of the .de, the country-code top-level domain for Germany.In 2005, it was one of five bidders seeking to win contract to operate the .net contract offered by ICANN....
(the Network Information Centre responsible for .de domains) does not require specific second-level domain

Second-level domain

In the Domain Name System hierarchy, a second-level domain is a domain that is directly below a top-level domain . For example, in wikipedia.org, wikipedia is the second-level domain of the .org TLD....
s, as it is the case with the .uk

.uk

.uk is the Internet country code top-level domain for the United Kingdom. As of July 2008, it is the fifth most popular top-level domain worldwide , with over 7 million registrations....
domain range for example.

The name is based on the first two letters of the German

German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
name for Germany (Deutschland). Prior to 1989, East Germany had a separate ISO 3166-1

ISO 3166-1

ISO 3166-1 is part of the ISO 3166 standardization published by the International Organization for Standardization , and defines codes for the names of country, dependent territory, and special areas of geographical interest....
code (dd) but it was never assigned its own ccTLD; de is the only German ccTLD that ever existed.

.de is currently the second most popular ccTLD in terms of number of registrations, after .cn

.cn

.com

.com is a generic top-level domain used on the Internet's Domain Name System. It was one of the original top-level domains , established in January 1985, and has grown to be the largest TLD in use....
and .cn

.cn

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Encyclopedia

.de is the country code top-level domain

Country code top-level domain

DENIC

Second-level domain

.uk

German language

ISO 3166-1

.cn

.com

.cn

.cn is the country code top-level domain for the People's Republic of China.The domain name administration in People's Republic of China is done through a branch of the Ministry of Information Industry....
among all TLDs.

The first point of registration for .de domains was at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Dortmund. uni-dortmund.de was among the first registered .de-domains.

.de registrations may be directly ordered from DENIC

DENIC

Domain name registrar

A domain name registrar is a company, accredited by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or by a national ccTLD authority, to register Internet domain names....
).

The domain name must have at least 3 letters and may not be exclusively composed of numbers. The only current known exceptions are db.de (Deutsche Bahn

Deutsche Bahn

Deutsche Bahn AG is the Germany national railway company, a private joint stock company . It came into existence in 1994 as the successor of the former state railways of Germany, the Deutsche Bundesbahn of West Germany and the Deutsche Reichsbahn of the GDR of East Germany....
), ix.de , and hq.de which were registered before the three letter rule was adopted.

Registrations of internationalized domain names

Internationalized domain name

An internationalized domain name 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 alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Chinese character or Hindi....
are also accepted so that all diacritics of German

German alphabet

The German language alphabet consists of the same 26 letters as the basic modern Latin alphabet:...
may be used.

In many romanic languages

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages comprising all the languages that descend from Latin language, the language of ancient Rome....
, e.g., Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
, French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
, Romanian

Romanian language

Romanian or Daco-Romanian ; self-designation: limba rom?na, ) is a Romance languages spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova....
and Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and Portugal. It is derived from the Latin language spoken by the Romanization Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago....
, "de" expresses the genitive of a noun (like "of" in English). This is exploited in domain registrations under the German TLD for romance language webhosts that offer customized sites, like elforo.de (theforum.of), cleverly encoding the site name into the URL

Uniform Resource Locator

In Information technology, a Uniform Resource Locator is a type of Uniform Resource Identifier that specifies where an identified resource is available and the mechanism for retrieving it....
path, such as elforo.de/wikipedia, meaning theforum.of/wikipedia.

.de

External links