.de
Encyclopedia
.de is the country code top-level domain
Country code top-level domain
A country code top-level domain is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, a sovereign state, or a dependent territory....

 (ccTLD) for the Federal Republic of Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. DENIC
DENIC
DENIC Verwaltungs- und Betriebsgesellschaft eG is the manager of the .de domain, 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.- Etymology :...

 (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 example.com, example is the second-level domain of the .com TLD....

s, as it is the case with the .uk
.uk
.uk is the Internet country code top-level domain for the United Kingdom. , it is the fourth most popular top-level domain worldwide , with over 9.5 million registrations....

 domain range which require .co.uk domain for example.

The name is based on the first two letters of the German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language 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 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization , and defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. The official name of the standard is Codes for the representation of names...

 code (dd), and had a never delegated ccTLD, .dd
.dd
.dd was the assigned country code top-level domain for the German Democratic Republic . It was chosen based on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code for the German Democratic Republic, the letters coming from the German name of the country: ...

.

.de is currently the most popular ccTLD in terms of number of registrations with .uk
.uk
.uk is the Internet country code top-level domain for the United Kingdom. , it is the fourth most popular top-level domain worldwide , with over 9.5 million registrations....

 being the second most popular ccTLD and .nl
.nl
.nl is the Internet country code top-level domain for the Netherlands. Registrations are processed via a network of participants. It is one of the more popular ccTLDs, ranked 3rd in the quarterly VeriSign Domain Name Industry Brief of May 2011 for the first quarter of 2011, after .de and .uk.It...

 being third. It is second after .com
.com
The domain name com is a generic top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet. Its name is derived from commercial, indicating its original intended purpose for domains registered by commercial organizations...

 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
DENIC Verwaltungs- und Betriebsgesellschaft eG is the manager of the .de domain, 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.- Etymology :...

 but it is faster and cheaper to do so via a DENIC
DENIC
DENIC Verwaltungs- und Betriebsgesellschaft eG is the manager of the .de domain, 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.- Etymology :...

 member (registrar
Domain name registrar
A domain name registrar is an organization or commercial entity, accredited by both ICANN and generic top-level domain registry to sell gTLDs and/or by a country code top-level domain registry to sell ccTLDs; to manage the reservation of Internet domain names in accordance with the guidelines of...

).

As of 23 October 2009, DENIC allowed the registration of single- and two-letter domains as well as number-only domains.

Registrations of internationalized domain name
Internationalized domain name
An internationalized domain name is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi or the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics,...

s are also accepted so that all diacritics of German and the eszett, ß
ß
In the German alphabet, ß is a letter that originated as a ligature of ss or sz. Like double "s", it is pronounced as an , but in standard spelling, it is only used after long vowels and diphthongs, while ss is used after short vowels...

, may be used.

In many of the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

, e.g., Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, Romanian
Romanian language
Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...

 and Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

, "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 computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....

path, such as elforo.de/wikipedia, meaning theforum.of/wikipedia. "de" is also a common romanization of the Japanese word for "by", so there is potential for sites to exploit this ("bus.de/ryoko" being travel by bus), but this has not been widely adopted.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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