.west
Is .west a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.west is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is XYZ.
A broad directional word with casual regional appeal; names will sell on price and novelty, not as a serious primary address.
regional businesses and brands that carry "west" in their name (coast, county, or city-west ventures), plus hobbyist and themed sites
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 .west: an unbounded affinity word that evokes a place and a way of life rather than naming a verifiable territory, so there is no authority to license it and no gate to pass — it only works if enough self-identifying businesses buy the connotation.
Both are short, ownerless common English words whose value rests on reading naturally as the back half of a phrase (go.west, farm.land) rather than on any registrant community, profession or category that would arrive pre-formed.
Also a generic place-word with no custodian, aimed at local businesses who put their identity on a vague geographic feeling, but it describes a settlement type anywhere while .west is a direction, so the buyer set is adjacent rather than the same.
What a .west domain is
.west is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Places. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .west domain extension real yet?
.west 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 .west domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .west name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .west was .country, delegated on 31 March 2014.
Is .west a real TLD?
Not yet. .west is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .west 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: 30-49, usable but limited. The string is a common directional word that many businesses already use as a suffix (a bakery, law firm or brewery named West), so a hack like key.west or wild.west is memorable and some regional operators would register it, mostly at a low price point. It is not in the 50-69 band because west names no category: there is no single industry whose serious projects would adopt it as a primary identity without explanation, and nothing in the verified facts suggests a community, geographic designation, or registry policy that would concentrate demand. It is not in the 10-29 band because the word has broad everyday use across regions and sectors, giving sustained if shallow registration demand rather than one-off novelty. By analogy (flagged as analogy), broad open-vocabulary strings run as general-purpose extensions have tended to accumulate registrations through promotional pricing with weak renewal and thin aftermarkets; the applicant on the record, XYZ.COM LLC, filed a standard application, and this application is also named as the primary for a deactivated .block application, which is neutral context on the registry's portfolio approach. Main market uncertainty: whether regional brands treat west as part of their name (strong hack demand) or as a disposable modifier (weak), and whether other compass-point or geographic extensions in the same round split that demand.