.lore
Is .lore a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .lore in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. Oinkadot named .lore as the replacement string of its .anime application.
A fun word for fan wikis, game worlds and storytelling sites, but few serious projects would make it their main address.
fan communities, worldbuilders, game and fiction studios, and creators publishing background canon for a franchise or a brand's origin story
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 generic common noun naming a collectively-maintained body of knowledge, sold to enthusiast communities and archivists who want their identity to say "this is the canonical record" — no incumbent commercial category underwrites it, so value depends entirely on whether communities adopt the word as a badge.
Same bet on internet-native vernacular: a short culture-word with no industry or trade behind it, where the buyer is a creator/fandom audience and success requires the word staying culturally live rather than any business needing to be reachable at it.
Same buyer and same community-adoption bet — fandom identity around a fictional world — differing only in which side it names (the audience rather than the accumulated canon), with no registered-business demand floor under either.
What a .lore domain is
.lore 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 .lore in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .lore domain extension real yet?
.lore 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 .lore domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .lore name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .lore was .wiki, delegated on 19 February 2014.
Is .lore a real TLD?
Not yet. .lore is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .lore as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Oinkadot · first recordedICANN
“OI2692T-T69849 · Oinkadot Inc · replacement string of .anime”ICANN
“CEI2660T-T22085 · Capella Exploration, Inc. · primary OI2692T-T54011 · Oinkadot Inc · replacement string of .dine · Deactivated”ICANN
“A new partnership has applied for 25 top level domain names in this year's ICANN TLD expansion round.”Domain Name Wire (Andrew Allemann)
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow). 'Lore' is a real, memorable English word with a clear semantic home in gaming, fandom and worldbuilding ('the lore' of a game or universe), and it has spread into startup and brand vocabulary ('company lore'). That gives it a natural fit for fan wikis, franchise canon sites, tabletop and game worlds, and storytelling communities, and makes a <franchise>.lore address instantly legible. The problem is that most of the natural registrants are fan projects built around someone else's trademark, hobby sites that rarely pay for a primary identity, or studios that already keep canon under their main brand domain; the word describes a section of a site more than it names a project. By analogy (flagged as analogy) with other evocative culture-word strings such as .wiki, .fan, .games or .lol, this shape of TLD tends to produce a modest, hobby-driven base with a thin aftermarket rather than category-standard adoption. Not the 30-49 band: it has no obvious volume or price-driven registration engine and primary-identity use would be the exception, not the norm. Not the 1-9 band: the word is strong, the fandom and gaming audience is large and online, and a handful of genuine primary-identity uses (game lore wikis, worldbuilding tools, narrative studios) are realistic within 5 years. Applicant facts, stated neutrally from the record: the single application is a replacement string by Oinkadot Inc, whose primary string is .anime, with a standard application type; that pairing suggests the TLD would be positioned toward the same fandom audience. Main market uncertainty: whether fandom and game communities adopt a dedicated TLD for canon sites at all, versus staying on established wiki platforms and brand subdomains; registration price point and whether any wiki-hosting or game-publisher partner anchors the namespace are unknown.