.waw
Is .waw a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .waw in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. tldbox GmbH named .waw as the replacement string of its .salzburg application.
A short string most people read as a Warsaw abbreviation; a niche city label that needs explaining and will see thin demand.
warsaw-focused businesses, venues, and local projects wanting a short city tag, plus a small group of registrants drawn to the "wow"-like sound
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 short insider abbreviation for one European city sold as that city's own namespace, which only works if locals and local businesses already read the three letters as the city and are willing to put their primary identity on a civic label.
Also a city initialism bet where the registry's value is municipal endorsement plus local-only eligibility rather than the word's meaning, though a globally legible code is a far easier sell than a national-market one.
Same buyer and same civic-identity bet for a single capital city, but it stakes it on the city's full local-language name instead of requiring the market to decode a three-letter abbreviation.
What a .waw domain is
.waw is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Places. Nobody has applied for .waw in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .waw domain extension real yet?
.waw 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 .waw domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .waw name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .waw was .bcn, delegated on 8 July 2015.
Is .waw a real TLD?
Not yet. .waw is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .waw as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- tldbox GmbH · first recordedICANN
“TG2593-T29738 · tldbox GmbH · replacement string of .salzburg”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow). The string .waw is most naturally read as an abbreviation for Warsaw (it is widely used that way, including as the city's airport code), and secondarily as a playful 'wow'-like sound; neither reading is a category a serious project worldwide would adopt as its primary identity without explanation. The record shows one application, by tldbox GmbH, filed as a standard (not geographic) type and as a replacement string for .salzburg, with no contention recorded; that framing suggests a second-choice string rather than a flagship city launch, which I treat neutrally as a signal of modest expected adoption. By analogy (flagged as analogy), full-name city TLDs such as .berlin, .wien, .nyc and .tokyo have produced modest, locally concentrated registration bases with little aftermarket outside a handful of generic words; an abbreviation is weaker than a full city name because it requires the buyer to know the shorthand, and Warsaw-based businesses already default to the national ccTLD (.pl), which is a strong habit to displace. It is not in the 30-49 band because I do not expect volume or price-driven registrations at scale: a 3-letter geo abbreviation with no built-in community mandate lacks the pull that moves registrations beyond enthusiasts. It is not in the 1-9 band because Warsaw is a large, economically active capital with a visible startup and events scene, so a real, if small, pool of local vanity and campaign registrations is plausible over 5 years. Main market uncertainty: whether the registry positions .waw as a Warsaw city identity (which would need local marketing and some public-sector or media endorsement to matter) or as a generic exclamation-style word; the former caps it as a small local label, the latter competes with far better-known novelty strings.