.mei
Is .mei a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .mei in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. .TOP Registry named .mei as the replacement string of its .zan application.
A short pinyin-flavoured string with a pleasant meaning that will sell on price and volume, not as a serious brand address.
Chinese-market registrants drawn by the pinyin reading "mei" (beauty, plum, a common given name), beauty and cosmetics sellers, and low-cost volume buyers at Chinese registrars
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 exactly: a three-letter Latin-script rendering of one CJK syllable that is a warm, positive everyday word to its own language community and meaningless noise to everyone else, so the registry has to sell meaning to one linguistic market rather than a category to a trade.
The identical structural wager — a single romanized Chinese syllable, short enough to be scarce and generic enough that no company owns it, banking on an open namespace where the word's resonance (not an industry it serves) is the whole product.
Under the given-name reading it is the nearest parallel: a short string that is one of the most-borne personal names in an East Asian population, sold as identity space to individuals who would put their own name on it, which works only if millions of same-named people self-register.
What a .mei domain is
.mei is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. Nobody has applied for .mei in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .mei domain extension real yet?
.mei 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 .mei domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .mei name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .mei was .xin, delegated on 7 March 2015.
Is .mei a real TLD?
Not yet. .mei is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .mei as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- .TOP Registry · first recordedICANN
“JBTC2662T-T53499 · Jiangsu Bangning Technology Co., Ltd. · replacement string of .zan”ICANN
“JBTC2662T-T37661 · Jiangsu Bangning Technology Co., Ltd. · replacement string of .sou · Deactivated XL2625T-T82038 · XYZ.COM LLC · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited. The string .mei reads naturally in pinyin as beauty, plum or a common given name, and in Dutch as the month of May, so it carries a mildly positive, short, memorable meaning rather than a defined category. The one application on the record is from .TOP Registry (Jiangsu Bangning Technology Co., Ltd.), filed as a replacement string for .zan; stated neutrally, the operator's existing portfolio sits in the Chinese registrar channel, which makes Chinese-market distribution the likely adoption path. By analogy (flagged as analogy), earlier pinyin and China-channel strings such as .wang, .ren and .xin registered in volume on promotional pricing but showed weak primary-identity use and thin aftermarkets once promotions ended; .mei would plausibly follow a similar curve over the next 5 years, with some genuine use by beauty, cosmetics and personal-name sites. It is not in the 50-69 band because there is no category in which a serious project would choose .mei as its default identity over .com or .cn, and demand would need explaining outside China. It is not in the 10-29 band because the meaning is broad and positive enough to support real, repeatable registrations beyond joke or event-driven use. Specific registration counts, prices and sale figures for the analogues are unknown here. Main market uncertainty: whether Chinese beauty and e-commerce brands treat a pinyin-meaning TLD as a credible storefront identity or only as a defensive or speculative registration, which decides whether any aftermarket forms at all.