.fav
Is .fav a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .fav in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. Intercap named .fav as the replacement string of its .real application.
A fun, memorable slang string for fan pages and "my favorite" hacks, but few serious projects would make it their main address.
fans, creators and brands wanting a playful "favorite" vanity address (name.fav, my.fav), plus curated-list and bookmark-style projects
No applications recorded for this TLD yet.
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Both are one-syllable social-endorsement actions lifted straight off a platform UI button, betting that a consumer-internet operator can turn a universal "I approve of this" gesture into a namespace for curation and sharing, rather than offering an identity any category of business would put its primary name on.
Same wager on an everyday verb of liking as a branded-engagement namespace run by its applicant, differing mainly in that it carries one language market with it instead of being a market-neutral clipping.
Same affinity-and-fandom bet pitched at creators and brands collecting followers, but it names the person who approves rather than the act of approving, so it reads as an identity a registrant adopts instead of a gesture a platform operates.
What a .fav domain is
.fav is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. Nobody has applied for .fav in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .fav domain extension real yet?
.fav is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .fav domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .fav name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .fav was .like, delegated on 5 December 2015.
Is .fav a real TLD?
Not yet. .fav is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .fav as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Intercap · first recordedICANN
“IRI2679T-T65321 · Intercap Registry Inc. · replacement string of .real”ICANN
“EDI2665T-T28371 · Endpoint Domains, Inc. · primary IRI2679T-T96997 · Intercap Registry Inc. · replacement string of .wiz · Deactivated NA2626T-T63059 · ShortDot (Ireland) Limited · replacement string of .ask · Deactivated XL2625T-T48604 · XYZ.COM LLC · replacement string of .con · Deactivated”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/joke/narrow), at the upper end. .fav is a short slang abbreviation of "favorite" with obvious domain-hack appeal (my.fav, yourname.fav, brand.fav) and a plausible home for fan pages, curated lists and bookmark-style projects, so it is clearly above 1-9: there is a real, if shallow, market for memorable vanity names. It is not in 30-49 because nothing in its meaning points to a category where a serious project would pick it as a primary identity; demand looks event-driven and promotional (fan campaigns, marketing hacks) rather than sustained, and there is no established volume dynamic to lean on. By analogy (flagged as analogy), sentiment and slang strings such as .fan/.fans and .love have attracted interest for vanity and campaign use but little durable primary-identity adoption or aftermarket, while short generic strings like .fun and .top reached volume mainly through low pricing with weak brand signal and heavy churn. .fav sits between those: more playful than .fun, with less generic utility, and its value would depend heavily on registry go-to-market. The record shows a single application from Intercap Registry Inc. as a replacement string for a primary .real application, with no contention; the filing source is the ICANN Reveal Day list (2026-10-07). Those operator facts are stated neutrally and bear only on launch, which is assumed. Main market uncertainty: whether the string gets positioned as a cheap promotional volume TLD (inflating counts, deflating brand signal) or as a curated vanity namespace, and whether any consumer platform adopts .fav as a favorites/bookmark convention; absent that, demand is likely to stay thin and novelty-driven over the next 5 years.