.war
Is .war a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.war is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is XYZ.
A punchy word that gamers and wordplay fans may grab, but its grim meaning keeps most serious projects away.
gamers, esports teams, military-history and strategy communities, and hobbyist projects wanting a loud one-word label; also wordplay domain hacks
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 plain martial common noun nobody owns, sold on affinity and metaphor rather than to a defined industry, so its registrants are enthusiasts, hobby/history communities and gaming groups who want the word's charge as their identity.
Also an unowned martial noun aimed at affinity and surplus/enthusiast registrants, but it names a specific institution with a real-world gatekeeper, whereas the target is an open activity word with no institution behind it.
Same thin-affinity-vertical wager — a martial word with no commercial category underneath it, depending on enthusiasts and gaming/clan identity to carry volume — though it is a branch label rather than the abstract concept.
What a .war domain is
.war is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .war domain extension real yet?
.war 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 .war domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .war name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .war was .army, delegated on 4 June 2014.
Is .war a real TLD?
Not yet. .war is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .war is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- XYZ · first recordedICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/joke/narrow). The string is a short, memorable English word with obvious appeal to gaming (strategy and shooter titles, esports clan names), military-history content, and figurative phrases (trade war, price war, tug of war), so demand is real but shallow and largely event-driven or novelty-led. The word's primary meaning is violent conflict, which makes it a poor primary identity for most companies, nonprofits, and institutions, and some markets and registrars tend to treat such strings cautiously. By analogy (flagged as analogy), existing single-word evocative TLDs like .army, .ninja, .wtf and .fail found a hobbyist and joke-name base without becoming a primary-identity default in any category; .war seems likely to follow that pattern, with gaming the one vertical where it could be used in earnest. It is not in the 30-49 band because the brand signal is actively negative for most buyers rather than merely weak, and the aftermarket is likely to consist of a handful of keyword names (game titles, 'tug.of' style hacks) rather than sustained liquidity. It is not in the 1-9 band because a memorable, pronounceable word with a gaming hook does have a realistic niche of registrants over the next 5 years. The applicant on the record is XYZ.COM LLC with a standard application, an operator that already runs multiple generic TLDs at retail scale, which supports the likelihood of broad registrar distribution; the registration count or pricing that would follow is unknown. Main market uncertainty: whether gaming and esports communities adopt the string as a lifestyle label the way some communities adopted other edgy TLDs, or whether its taboo connotation leaves it mostly parked and promo-driven.