IDN (internationalized domain names)

IDN domain names are written in foreign languages, such as Chinese, Japanese or Russian. IDN stands for Internationalized Domain Names. IDN domains allow people from all over the world to communicate websites, domain names and URLs in their native language.

Most domain names registered to date are written using the Latin/English alphabets of 26 characters and numbers, an encoding called ASCII. IDN domain names allow the use of non-ASCII characters. When an IDN is registered, the foreign characters are encoded in Punycode using a series of algorithms. Punycode is simply an ASCII version of the IDN, which allows it to be resolved in the current Internet system.

Punycode domains can be identified by the beginning “xn-“.