.heart
Is .heart a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.heart is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Oinkadot.
Who is applying, and what they run today
Oinkadot filed 25 applications across the round.
Will names sell?
.heart is a warm, giftable word that suits charities, health projects, and romance brands, but few will make it their main address.
Last round the AI scored the 2012 strings blind to their fate. Strings it scored 60 or more hold a median 27,168 names today; those under 30, a median of 30. .heart’s closest 2012 strings hold .love 69K, .smile 2 and .joy 2.
The nearest 2012 strings, and how many names each holds today
The closest 2012 string, .love, held 68,867 names, June 2026. .smile held 2; .joy held 2. Chosen by AI from every string in the 2012 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.
cardiology and heart-health organizations, charities and cause campaigns, dating and romance brands, and individuals buying sentimental or gift domains
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, in our Culture category. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
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. A .heart name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .heart was .love, delegated on 2 April 2015.
Is .heart a real TLD?
Not yet. .heart is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .heart is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Oinkadot · now confirmedICANN
- 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.