.hey
Is .hey a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.hey is contested: 2 applicants have said publicly that they applied to run it, as of 9 September 2026. They are ShortDot and Link Freedom Group.
A friendly, memorable word, but greetings come before names, not after, so few serious projects would make .hey their main address.
creators, individuals, and casual consumer brands wanting a playful personal page or handle-style address, plus marketers grabbing short campaign hooks
In LFG's published list of 300+ strings submitted before the ICANN window closed on 2026-08-12. Their catalog tagline: “Casual, approachable, always open.”
One of the 80 strings ShortDot published for the ICANN 2026 round. ShortDot states it has submitted 40 applications, but publishes the 80 strings without revealing which 40 are applications and which 40 are designated replacements. The submission claim is therefore applicant-level, not string-level: nothing in the source says ShortDot applied for THIS string. Catalogued, not announced.
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 short spoken/typed interjection with no category behind it, sold on tone and memorability alone, so the registry is betting people will hang a personal or playful primary identity on an exclamation rather than on a business vertical.
Also a one-syllable universal exclamation with no industry to anchor demand, dependent on the same premise that expressive attitude words can carry identity, though .wow leans promotional/marketing while .hey leans person-to-person address.
Captures the other half of the bet — .hey as a greeting that opens a conversation, aimed at messaging and email identity — but it is a plain category verb for communication rather than the utterance itself, so it sells the function while .hey sells the gesture.
What a .hey domain is
.hey is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. 2 applicants have said publicly that they applied for .hey.
Is the .hey domain extension real yet?
.hey 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 .hey domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .hey name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .hey was .lol, delegated on .
Is .hey a real TLD?
Not yet. .hey is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant said publicly that it applied for .hey in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round. Every claim on this page links to its source.
- ShortDot · now announced
- ShortDot · first recordedShortDot (Ireland) Limited
- Link Freedom Group · first recordedLink Freedom Group
“ShortDot (Ireland) Limited has submitted 40 applications to ICANN's 2026 New gTLD Program. The 80 strings shown include applied-for and designated replacement strings across ShortDot's 40 ICANN applications, presented without revealing their status or pairing.”ShortDot (Ireland) Limited
“.hey · Culture · “Casual, approachable, always open.””Link Freedom Group
“The company just disclosed its 40 applications and 40 replacement strings.”Domain Name Wire
“LFG voluntarily published its full list of submissions ahead of ICANN’s official Reveal Day.”PR Newswire (Link Freedom Group)
“Top level domain registry Link Freedom Group (LFG) has disclosed more than 300 strings submitted as part of the ICANN new top level domain name program.”Domain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann)
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow), at its top end. The string is a universally recognized English greeting, short and warm, which gives it genuine memorability and some registration appeal for personal pages, link-in-bio style identities, and playful campaign microsites. The structural problem is word order: a greeting naturally precedes a name ('hey Sarah'), so 'sarah.hey' reads backwards; the semantic energy of the word sits on the wrong side of the dot for most constructions. By analogy (flagged as analogy), conversational-word TLDs and interjection-style strings have historically produced novelty and event-driven registrations rather than sustained primary-identity use, and their aftermarkets have been thin outside a handful of one-word matches. It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no visible buyer group likely to register at volume for durable use rather than novelty, and the brand signal it adds to a serious project is closer to a wink than credibility. It is not in the 1-9 band because the word is instantly understood worldwide, costs nothing to explain, and could plausibly sustain a small hobbyist and campaign market over the next 5 years. Applicant facts are neutral context: LFG filed a very large portfolio of strings, which says little about dedicated marketing muscle behind this one string either way. Main market uncertainty: whether any consumer platform or identity product adopts .hey as its user-handle namespace, which is the one path from novelty to a real niche.