.heart
Is .heart a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.heart is not contested. One applicant has said publicly that it applied to run it, and nobody else has, as of 16 August 2026. It is Oinkadot.
.heart is a warm, giftable word that suits charities, health projects, and romance brands, but few will make it their main address.
cardiology and heart-health organizations, charities and cause campaigns, dating and romance brands, and individuals buying sentimental or gift domains
One of 25 strings the Oinkadot partnership (Ray King of Porkbun and Todd Han of Dynadot) applied for in the ICANN 2026 round, per Domain Name Wire's exclusive.
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-syllable, universally understood emotion word with no defined registrant class, where the registry is wagering that warmth and memorability alone will pull identity-level registrations from consumers, charities, and dating/gifting brands rather than serving any one industry.
Also an affective everyday noun that doubles as a body/health referent (dentistry, as heart does cardiology), so it makes the same two-audience wager — feel-good consumer branding on one side, a clinical vertical on the other — with neither audience obligated to move.
Another abstract positive-feeling noun sold on connotation rather than category membership; like heart it has no natural gatekeeper, no professional body, and no functional keyword use, so demand depends entirely on someone deciding the sentiment is worth building a brand on.
What a .heart domain is
.heart is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. One applicant has said publicly that it applied for .heart.
Is the .heart domain extension real yet?
.heart is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .heart domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .heart name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .heart was .love, delegated on .
Is .heart a real TLD?
Not yet. .heart is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant said publicly that it applied for .heart in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round. Every claim on this page links to its source.
- Oinkadot · first recordedDomain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann)
“A new partnership has applied for 25 top level domain names in this year's ICANN TLD expansion round.”Domain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann)
- Scored 30, the floor of the usable-but-limited band. .heart is a universally understood emotional English word with two plausible serious veins: heart-health (clinics, cardiology practices, awareness campaigns) and cause/romance branding. That earns it more than the vanity band below (10-29): a cardiology group or heart-disease charity could credibly use name.heart as a primary identity, which is more than event-driven gift demand. It stays out of the strong-niche band above (50-69) because no vein looks deep enough for sustained primary-identity adoption without explanation: medical institutions are conservative and default to legacy namespaces, and romance-adjacent demand on analogous emotional-word TLDs such as .love has, by analogy, skewed toward low-price sentimental registrations rather than serious builds or a real aftermarket (analogy, not asserted data). Registration volume could be respectable on promotional pricing given the word's warmth, but the brand signal is soft and resale value likely thin. Delegation and availability are assumed per rubric. The applicant, Oinkadot, is a venture of two consumer-registrar CEOs (Ray King of Porkbun, Todd Han of Dynadot), which plausibly improves retail distribution and consumer visibility; Oinkadot applied for 25 strings in the ICANN 2026 round, paying $5.675 million in fees. Main market uncertainty: whether the health/charity sector, the one buyer group with primary-identity potential, treats .heart as credible for institutional use over the next 5 years, or whether demand settles almost entirely into low-value sentimental registrations.