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Ever wonder what those .com's and .net's at the end of web addresses and email addresses stand for? They're formally called domain name extensions and there are hundreds of them.

For users completely new to the internet, I'll give a quick explanation of what a domain name is. When a computer is connected to the internet, it's given an ip address. This is a series of four numbers separated by periods. For example, 188.83.77.199. To access somebody's website, you could enter this number but it's not very easy for the average person to remember something like that. And, so, domain names were born. This is a series of words separated by periods. For example, imalittleteapot.com. Much easier to remember, isn't it? When you register your domain name, it automatically redirects the reader to your ip address.

Going back to domain name extensions, these are the two to four letter words that follow the period in the name. Sometimes, there are two extensions, such as in the example imalittleteapot.co.uk. Here's a shortened list of some of the more common domain name extensions:

com - This extension was originally meant for commercial organizations such as corporations but has since expanded for use by anybody.
net - Available for use by anybody.
edu - Meant for educational institutions from grade schools to universities.
org - Although it's now available for use by anybody, it was originally intended for nonprofit institutions like churches and charities.
gov - Meant for use by federal, state, city, and other government entities. Governments aside from the United States, however, often use their country's code as their extension.
info - A general extension meant for informative sites. For example, a website about the health and care of ferrets could use it.
biz - Used by businesses.
tv - Initially, this was meant as a country code for the country Tuvalu but, later, it reverted to a code useable by anyone. For the most part, it's used for sites with a great deal of multimedia such as video files. Televisions shows and networks particularly like it.
fm - This one is similar to tv. Although it's often used by radio stations, it actually stands for the Federated States of Micronesia.
name - An extension meant for personal use. For example, stevetarson.name might include Steve Tarson's biography and resume.

A number of country extensions also exist. For the most part, these are used for people and organizations from a particular region, such as:

us - United States
jp - Japan
fr - France
uk - United Kingdom

Like I said before, there are a huge number of these extensions and most of them are country codes. If you or a group you're affiliated with decide to register a domain name and you're using a web hosting provider, they should know what extensions are available for you to use. Since new extensions are often added, however, it might help to do some research. .biz and .info, for example, are fairly recent compared to .edu and .com.

Learn more about this author, Kayla Weller.
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