A pleasant, brandable word without a clear home market; expect price-driven signups and name-hacks, not a go-to identity.
brand-minded startups and creatives wanting a short evocative suffix (audio and music tools, surf and ocean projects, wellness and energy brands, name-hacks like heat.wave or sound.wave)
One of 40 strings Starlight Registry (established by registrar Namecheap) applied for in the ICANN 2026 round, reported by Domain Name Wire on 2026-08-19.
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 as .wave: a short, concrete-but-metaphorical single-syllable English noun that no industry owns, sold on connotation rather than category fit, so its registrants are brands and products borrowing the word's feel rather than any defined vertical.
Also a common evocative noun with no owning category, monetized as an open general-purpose registry where the string's metaphorical stretch (place/room/frontier, as with wave's motion/signal/sound) is the entire value proposition.
Another generic non-vertical noun bet where anyone can plausibly claim it, but it reads more as a functional locational suffix than a naming-grade evocative word, so it attracts utility registrations rather than the primary-identity brand use .wave is chasing.
- Starlight Registry · first recordedDomain Name Wire
“For us, moving into the registry side is a natural extension of what we have been building.”Domain Name Wire