franken.domains: Stitched-Together Domains, Because Every Dictionary .com Is Taken

Every dictionary word .com is taken. Registered between 1995 and 2005, in every major language. The dictionary is sold out.

But there are still plenty of creative alternatives: domain hacks. Cut the word so its last letters become the top-level domain. Wilderness becomes wilderne.ss. Uploading becomes upload.ing. Telephone becomes teleph.one. Everyone knows the famous ones: bit.ly , insta.gram , del.icio.us .

Stitched-together domains, hence the name of my new side project: franken.domains . Nobody could tell me how many of these are still free, so I checked all of them. At the time of writing: 12,799 real words, registrable right now.

Checking all of them ¶

I took roughly 355,000 words from German, English, Spanish, and French word lists and generated every possible cut against every TLD in the IANA root zone. That produced 124,490 candidate domains across 208 TLDs.

Every candidate goes through two checks: a cheap DNS lookup first, then an RDAP query at the responsible registry. A domain counts as free only when the registry itself answers 404. Anything unclear stays off the list. A worker loop keeps rechecking, so the list does not rot. (The pipeline is Elixir: thousands of concurrent lookups with per-registry rate limiting.)

What you find there ¶

The site shows a small rotating drop of free domains plus a rate-limited search, so nobody can scrape the full list. The biggest sources of free domains:

• .ing - over 1,700 free -ing words (upload.ing, gossip.ing, assign.ing). Google launched this TLD in 2023 and the market has not picked through it yet, though beware premium pricing.
• .as (American Samoa) and .ng (Nigeria) carry hundreds of Spanish and English endings.
• .re (Réunion) shows up in words like su.re, pu.re, and wi.re.
• .ist, .bar, .tel quietly absorb a lot of German.

And the German list is where it gets charming: fixpla.tz, schmierf.ink, and teleph.one, which works in both languages.