I was brainstorming a name for a side project, and wanted the name to be an available .com domain to register. There’s .net, .org, and many other TLDs but everyone knows that .com is the best. Google claims that TLDs are not a factor in Google search apart from in finding local results for international users. Nevertheless, there’s a trustworthiness factor to .com domains that can’t be matched, with an assumption by some number of users that COMPANYNAME.com is the definitive, official domain.

The problem is, when browsing for .com domains you quickly realise that almost everything good has been taken. Mostly by domain squatters, who demands thousands of dollars for domains that they’ve done nothing with. Essentially a form of cyberspace rent-seeking.

I found a name that was just perfect for my project, but unfortunately it was registered by a squatter using GoDaddy’s registrar. GoDaddy provide a domain broker service for this, where you pay a broker upfront to attempt to contact the domain owners and they negotiate a price for you. If the deal goes through, then the broker gets a hefty cut. If it doesn’t, or the domain owner doesn’t respond, you’ve still lost the upfront fee. Seems like a bad deal unless you’re desperate.

Out of curiosity I decided to discover all one word .com domains that you can still register. The results are here. The wordlist was /usr/share/dict/american-english on Ubuntu.

The vast majority of the available domains are predictably obscure, or words with negative connotations that you couldn’t build a product around. Like sickliest.com. Many of the words are adjectives in the comparative or superlative form which just sound odd as individual words e.g. loyaller.com, loyallest.com.

I did see a couple of cool ones like tasted.com and diskette.com but these only came up because they were in some sort of post-expiry limbo state and weren’t actually available to register. If you’re into poetry, anapests.com and trochees.com are available.

Overall, only 1206 of 74585 words in the dictionary were available. Next I want to try two-word combinations, where there’s bound to be a bunch of cool domain ideas that nobody has picked up yet. It will obviously take a long time to run through them all so the script should look for combinations of words that work well together with assonance, rhymes, or topical similarity,