.oolong
Is .oolong a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .oolong, as of 7 October 2026. One applicant claimed it and is out. We keep the entry on the record either way.
- Journey To The West
A charming label for tea shops and tea lovers, but too narrow for most businesses to build a serious address on.
specialty tea retailers, tea brands and importers, tea-culture publications and cafes wanting a whimsical, tea-flavored web identity
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “Tea that bridges green and black, leaf and craft.”
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 narrow beverage-type noun rather than the parent category, betting that producers, importers and merchants of one specific drink will put their primary identity on the varietal word itself.
Same kind of buyer — roasters, growers, shops and enthusiasts across a whole beverage trade adopting the drink's own generic noun — but it is the full category where oolong is a sub-varietal, so the addressable base is far broader.
Another artisanal-beverage generic whose value depends on a craft/connoisseur community treating the drink noun as a badge, though again it names the whole category rather than one type within it.
What a .oolong domain is
.oolong is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Commerce. Nobody is chasing .oolong today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .oolong domain extension real yet?
.oolong 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 .oolong domain?
You can’t yet. A .oolong 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 .oolong was .vodka, delegated on 31 March 2014.
Is .oolong a real TLD?
Not yet. .oolong is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .oolong and is no longer in it. We keep the entry, and every entry on this page links to its source.
- Journey To The West · now abandonedICANN
- Journey To The West · first recordedJourney To The West Corporation
“.oolong · Cuisine · “Tea that bridges green and black, leaf and craft.””Journey To The West Corporation
- Oolong names one tea variety, a subset of an already-niche beverage category, so the addressable buyer pool over the next 5 years is small: specialty tea sellers, cafes, and hobbyist publications. By analogy (flagged as analogy), broader food-and-drink TLDs like .coffee and .wine achieved only modest registration bases and thin aftermarkets despite naming whole categories; a single-variety string sits well below that. The word is memorable and pleasant, which supports vanity and marketing registrations on price, but few serious brands are likely to adopt it as primary identity when generic alternatives carry more recognition. I place it in the 10-29 band: above 1-9 because a real, if shallow, pool of tea businesses and enthusiasts exists and the word is globally recognizable; below 30-49 because volume registrations and any meaningful brand signal are unlikely for a variety-level term. Main market uncertainty: whether Chinese and East Asian specialty-tea e-commerce, where oolong carries the most cultural weight, would adopt a Latin-script niche TLD at all rather than defaulting to established namespaces.