.COM Domain naming in French, Italian and Spanisch
September 2, 2017 6:14 AM Subscribe
What are common domain endings (eg. shoes24.com, myshoes.com) in these languages for .COM domains?
Assuming it must be a .COM domain and all generic domains are long taken, what are common domain endings for domains tageting French, Spanish and Italian customers. book24.com may lock good in English but may be unusual as livre24.com for the French market.
Any ideas, feedback welcome.
Assuming it must be a .COM domain and all generic domains are long taken, what are common domain endings for domains tageting French, Spanish and Italian customers. book24.com may lock good in English but may be unusual as livre24.com for the French market.
Any ideas, feedback welcome.
It's not very clear to me what the question is, are you looking for a TLD or a domain name?
posted by Lanark at 7:52 AM on September 2, 2017
posted by Lanark at 7:52 AM on September 2, 2017
Footnote here: AzraelBrown wrote ".ca for French Canadians"
Not specifically. .ca is the top domain for Canada. For example, apple.ca, amazon.ca and so forth will take you to the Canadian sites of these firms, not only in French. There are also provincial domains, used mostly by official bodies, everything from .bc.ca to .nl.ca.
posted by zadcat at 8:03 AM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
Not specifically. .ca is the top domain for Canada. For example, apple.ca, amazon.ca and so forth will take you to the Canadian sites of these firms, not only in French. There are also provincial domains, used mostly by official bodies, everything from .bc.ca to .nl.ca.
posted by zadcat at 8:03 AM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I'm pretty sure the OP doesn't want to know about TLDs, but rather, the prefixes and suffixes that are used in those languages to differentiate the company/organization domain name if it's a common one that's already been taken in the .com TLD, the way that in English, you might put "my" or "the" in front of a word. Example: "atlantic.com" is the domain of a company called Atlantic Computing, so the Atlantic Monthly magazine has the domain "theatlantic.com." The American Historical Association was beaten out by the American Hospital Association, so for a while its domain was theaha.org (now it's historians.org).
Of those three languages, I know French best, and I'm not aware of any specific conventions. It's not uncommon to append a place name to the domain, e.g. the Hôtel Bristol in Nice is bristol-nice.com, while the Hôtel Bristol in Le Touquet is hotelbristol-letouquet.com. Some businesses will append their postcode or the first two digits of the postcode (which identify the administrative département in which they're located). Ma and mon (my) are sometimes used, as are le, la, and les (the), e.g. the recipe site mafourchette.com (my fork) and the restaurant reservation site lafourchette.com (the fork).
posted by brianogilvie at 9:37 AM on September 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
Of those three languages, I know French best, and I'm not aware of any specific conventions. It's not uncommon to append a place name to the domain, e.g. the Hôtel Bristol in Nice is bristol-nice.com, while the Hôtel Bristol in Le Touquet is hotelbristol-letouquet.com. Some businesses will append their postcode or the first two digits of the postcode (which identify the administrative département in which they're located). Ma and mon (my) are sometimes used, as are le, la, and les (the), e.g. the recipe site mafourchette.com (my fork) and the restaurant reservation site lafourchette.com (the fork).
posted by brianogilvie at 9:37 AM on September 2, 2017 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: It must be a .com
If you want to register, let's say "livre.com" which is taken already, what a common post-fixes or prefixes? ? live24.com? mylivre.com? Country specific domain names are not an option.
posted by yoyo_nyc at 10:02 AM on September 2, 2017
If you want to register, let's say "livre.com" which is taken already, what a common post-fixes or prefixes? ? live24.com? mylivre.com? Country specific domain names are not an option.
posted by yoyo_nyc at 10:02 AM on September 2, 2017
First off, your domain name is a very important part of your branding, and this is the type of thing for which mid- to large-size companies pay large sums to dedicated marketing firms with bucketloads of experience in branding in the countries/languages you'll be doing business with.
So my first point would be: If you are the type of company or project with any kind of a budget at all, you should be working with one of these companies that can bring actual experience and resources to bear to get good answers to your question, then you should definitely be working with one of these companies to answer this question. If you don't, you can easily end up spending (lots) more money on the back end trying to repair a problem you didn't see coming.
One reason this is necessary, is (if you are serious about this project, or if there is real money involved at any level) you absolutely must run whatever idea you have past a good pool of native speakers in each language who are also in your target demographics for the project. That is the type of thing that a good marketing firm would have access to, that you just don't.
If, on the other hand, this is more of a private or personal project, where you can't even spend $1000 on getting good advice on branding, then here are my thoughts:
- You have basically two options: 1. Come up with a completely new word (or phrase or initialism) for your web site--like XKCD, Kleenex, etc--or 2. Your existing name or topic plus another word or two.
You seem to have already decided on the second option, but it is worth giving at least a bit of thought to the first option. However, since you asked about the first option, I am going to focus my thoughts on that:
- Coming up with a second word to add to your existing word, and that will work in three languages, the obvious solutions are:
1. Word in English or some other "neutral" language. A really simple & ordinary word is likely best. So MyBooks.com BestBooks.com GoodBooks.com AndBooks.com OrBooks.com TopBooks.com EasyBooks.com EZBooks.com, etc
2. Something like a numeral or symbol that is usable & understandable in all three languages. domain names can use letters, numerals, and dashes. So: 1Books.com Books1.com 39Books.com 100books.com books-books.com 1-books.com etc
3. Along those same lines, maybe just a single letter plus your generic name--ZBooks.com ABooks.com QBooks.com, or ABCBooks.com, AZBooks.com, AOBooks.com, QQQBooks.com and such. The nice thing here is that the letter doesn't need to MEAN anything at all--but if chosen right could help your domain name become more memorable.
4. Find some other (preferably simple) word that is somehow part of your actual name or mission. That is where we get names like TheRegister.com, TheAtlantic.com, bristol-nice.com, and such. It isn't so much that "The" is the preferable word, or "NICE" but rather that they mined words that were already part of their name or routinely used to discriminate their business identity from other similarly named businesses.
So it is hard for us to suggest to you ideas along this line, because they are very specific to your particular business, it's name and location, etc. But this is likely one of your best options.
5. This was my best idea, but checking it out I don't think it will work: That is, to find some word that is cognate among French, Italian, and Spanish, and use that as your additional word. There are some thoughts and resources here, including complete lists of all cognate words among the various Romance languages of Europe and more here.
The problem: There is a good list of cognate words (well worth looking at--it may spark some ideas), but each language spells them differently. So I don't think there is one single word that will work.
Still, the list is worth reading over as it may spark some ideas. Maybe your solution is a word in one of the three languages (do more of your customers speak one of the three languages) that is also at least comprehensible or neutral in the other two languages. For example, BenBooks.com or EntreBooks.com, VentBooks.com wouldn't be too bad.
6. Related, perhaps a Latin word could be your added word in a "neutral" language. If it is a Latin word whose descendants are still in common use in each of the three languages, that might be a plus. DulcisBooks.com, BonusBooks.com, VentBooks.com etc.
Again, I wouldn't run with ANY of these ideas without running them past a good pool of people who are native speakers in each of the three target languages.
posted by flug at 2:49 PM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
So my first point would be: If you are the type of company or project with any kind of a budget at all, you should be working with one of these companies that can bring actual experience and resources to bear to get good answers to your question, then you should definitely be working with one of these companies to answer this question. If you don't, you can easily end up spending (lots) more money on the back end trying to repair a problem you didn't see coming.
One reason this is necessary, is (if you are serious about this project, or if there is real money involved at any level) you absolutely must run whatever idea you have past a good pool of native speakers in each language who are also in your target demographics for the project. That is the type of thing that a good marketing firm would have access to, that you just don't.
If, on the other hand, this is more of a private or personal project, where you can't even spend $1000 on getting good advice on branding, then here are my thoughts:
- You have basically two options: 1. Come up with a completely new word (or phrase or initialism) for your web site--like XKCD, Kleenex, etc--or 2. Your existing name or topic plus another word or two.
You seem to have already decided on the second option, but it is worth giving at least a bit of thought to the first option. However, since you asked about the first option, I am going to focus my thoughts on that:
- Coming up with a second word to add to your existing word, and that will work in three languages, the obvious solutions are:
1. Word in English or some other "neutral" language. A really simple & ordinary word is likely best. So MyBooks.com BestBooks.com GoodBooks.com AndBooks.com OrBooks.com TopBooks.com EasyBooks.com EZBooks.com, etc
2. Something like a numeral or symbol that is usable & understandable in all three languages. domain names can use letters, numerals, and dashes. So: 1Books.com Books1.com 39Books.com 100books.com books-books.com 1-books.com etc
3. Along those same lines, maybe just a single letter plus your generic name--ZBooks.com ABooks.com QBooks.com, or ABCBooks.com, AZBooks.com, AOBooks.com, QQQBooks.com and such. The nice thing here is that the letter doesn't need to MEAN anything at all--but if chosen right could help your domain name become more memorable.
4. Find some other (preferably simple) word that is somehow part of your actual name or mission. That is where we get names like TheRegister.com, TheAtlantic.com, bristol-nice.com, and such. It isn't so much that "The" is the preferable word, or "NICE" but rather that they mined words that were already part of their name or routinely used to discriminate their business identity from other similarly named businesses.
So it is hard for us to suggest to you ideas along this line, because they are very specific to your particular business, it's name and location, etc. But this is likely one of your best options.
5. This was my best idea, but checking it out I don't think it will work: That is, to find some word that is cognate among French, Italian, and Spanish, and use that as your additional word. There are some thoughts and resources here, including complete lists of all cognate words among the various Romance languages of Europe and more here.
The problem: There is a good list of cognate words (well worth looking at--it may spark some ideas), but each language spells them differently. So I don't think there is one single word that will work.
Still, the list is worth reading over as it may spark some ideas. Maybe your solution is a word in one of the three languages (do more of your customers speak one of the three languages) that is also at least comprehensible or neutral in the other two languages. For example, BenBooks.com or EntreBooks.com, VentBooks.com wouldn't be too bad.
6. Related, perhaps a Latin word could be your added word in a "neutral" language. If it is a Latin word whose descendants are still in common use in each of the three languages, that might be a plus. DulcisBooks.com, BonusBooks.com, VentBooks.com etc.
Again, I wouldn't run with ANY of these ideas without running them past a good pool of people who are native speakers in each of the three target languages.
posted by flug at 2:49 PM on September 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
The new TLD system, where companies with deep pockets can make their own, is a bit less geographically organized, but you still need to either have deep pockets yourself or find someone with deep pockets who has an interest in that language.
To register a domain for another country, the rules vary; some don't care, but some require some business connection to that country.
posted by AzraelBrown at 6:44 AM on September 2, 2017