.ham
Is .ham a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .ham in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. XYZ named .ham as the replacement string of its .wood application.
A hobby-and-novelty name: fun for ham radio operators, meat sellers and place-name hacks, but rarely a serious main web address.
amateur (ham) radio operators wanting a callsign-style address, cured-meat producers and delis, and people after place-name or surname hacks ending in -ham
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.
Same bet: a single narrow consumable-product noun whose registrants would be the producers, curers and sellers of that one product plus the enthusiast trade around it, rising or falling on whether a one-ingredient industry will re-root its identity off its own brand names.
Also a bare grocery-item generic — narrower than any category play — where the realistic identity-holders are a handful of producers of exactly that item, so the string's value rests on owning a word people type as a product, not as a business type.
A single food-item word that doubles as a business type, the same hopeful mechanism .ham needs (delis and curers adopting the product noun as their shopfront), but with a far larger pure-play merchant base behind it, which makes the bet materially safer than the target's.
What a .ham domain is
.ham 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 .ham in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .ham domain extension real yet?
.ham 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 .ham domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .ham name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .ham was .vodka, delegated on 31 March 2014.
Is .ham a real TLD?
Not yet. .ham is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .ham as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- XYZ · first recordedICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/joke/narrow). The string has three real but small meanings: amateur radio (a long-standing hobbyist community that already identifies by callsign), ham as a food category (producers, delis, regional cured-meat brands), and a word-ending hack for English place names and surnames (notting.ham, west.ham, gra.ham, abra.ham). None of these groups currently lacks a namespace: radio operators tend to use callsign-based names on legacy TLDs or hobby directories, food brands use .com or country codes, and hack demand is typically a short burst of memorable registrations rather than sustained primary-identity use. By analogy (flagged as analogy), single-hobby and single-food-word TLDs such as .fish, .beer, .ski, .wine or the restricted .radio have produced modest, sometimes hobbyist-loyal registration bases and thin aftermarkets, with the best names being the place-name and surname hacks rather than generic words. It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no obvious path to volume registrations: the word is short and memorable, but its hobby meaning is narrow and the food meaning is a sub-category of a sub-category, so registrations are more likely to be sentimental or hack-driven than business-driven. It is not in the 1-9 band because a real community exists with an identity habit (callsigns, club pages, contest logs) that a callsign.ham address fits naturally, and the -ham place-name hack gives a credible, if small, premium tier. Applicant facts on the record: one application by XYZ.COM LLC, recorded as a standard application and as a replacement string for a primary .wood application; the operator's established registrar distribution would make the TLD broadly available at retail, which supports adoption likelihood but does not change the ceiling of the string. Main market uncertainty: whether the amateur radio community actually migrates identity to callsign.ham in meaningful numbers, or treats it as a novelty alongside existing habits; pricing and any launch promotion are unknown from the facts provided.