Random Country TLD Generator

How this country domain generator works

Press Generate and you get a country and its two-letter internet domain. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them to your clipboard. Three filters trim first: Starts with and Ends with match the first and last character of the entry, and Contains matches anywhere.

These are called ccTLDs, country code top-level domains. And the interesting thing about them is that no country picked its own.

Nobody chose .de, and nobody chose .ch

Germany's domain is .de. Not .ge, not .ger. It is .de because Germany's two-letter code in ISO 3166, the international standard for country codes, is DE, and DE comes from Deutschland.

Switzerland is .ch. Not .sw, not .sz. CH stands for Confoederatio Helvetica, which is Switzerland in Latin, chosen because Switzerland has four official languages and Latin does not take sides between them.

Spain is .es, from España.

The rule, formalised in RFC 1591, is that a country code top-level domain is taken from the ISO 3166 two-letter list. Nobody applies for a nice domain. You get the letters the standard already gave you.

Which means the internet inherited a set of names that were designed for shipping manifests and customs forms, and we have been living with them ever since.

Ten pairs, so you can see it: Brazil .br, Egypt .eg, Iceland .is, Japan .jp, Kenya .ke, Mexico .mx, Nepal .np, Norway .no, Portugal .pt, Vietnam .vn.

"IANA is not in the business of deciding what is a country"

That sentence is written into RFC 1591, the 1994 document that still governs how these domains are handed out, and it is one of the more quietly remarkable sentences in the history of the internet.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority runs the root of the domain name system. It could have decided for itself which places deserved a domain. Instead it pointed at somebody else's list and said: whatever they say.

The list it pointed at was ISO 3166. So the internet's map of the world is a map drawn by a standards committee for the purposes of trade, and adopted by the internet because it did not want the argument.

This is not a small thing. It means the shape of the internet's country namespace was decided by people who were not thinking about the internet at all.

The United Kingdom is not .gb

Almost every ccTLD matches its ISO code exactly. There is one famous exception, and you are probably looking at it every day.

The United Kingdom's ISO 3166 code is GB. Its domain is .uk.

Start with why the code is GB at all. ISO avoids building country codes out of words like United, Kingdom, Republic and Democratic, because those components repeat across dozens of country names and would collide with each other. So the code was taken from Great Britain instead.

Then the internet arrived out of order. JANET, the British academic network, had already defined "uk" as a top-level identifier under its own naming scheme, a few months before the ISO-derived list was compiled. So .uk was registered on 24 July 1985, and it stuck.

The domain .gb was assigned as well, with the intention that everybody would migrate to it. Nobody did. It saw some years of use, mostly by British government bodies and by commercial email services running on X.400, a mail system that used GB as its country code and so mapped neatly onto the domain. Then X.400 died.

Today .gb is still in the root. One lonely subdomain is still registered under it, hmg.gb, assigned to Her Majesty's Government, doing essentially nothing. No new registrations are accepted.

So there is a domain sitting in the internet's root zone that represents one of the world's larger economies and is used by nobody, because a university network in the 1980s made a decision first.

The domain that outlived its country

The Soviet Union was assigned .su on 19 September 1990. Fifteen months later the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Russia's own domain, .ru, was not delegated until 1994.

SU was struck from ISO 3166 in 1992. And .su is still there. It is still in the root zone, registrars still accept new registrations, and around a hundred thousand domains sit under it.

For decades this sat in an awkward gap. IANA's policy was to derive domains from ISO 3166, but there was no formal process for switching one off. A retirement policy was finally written and approved by ICANN's board in 2022: when a code leaves the ISO list, its domain retires after a transition period, five years by default. In February 2025 a letter went to the .su administrator informing it of a phase-out aimed at 2030.

A country that has not existed since before most of the internet's users were born will have kept its domain for roughly forty years.

Others went more quietly. East Timor's .tp became .tl. Yugoslavia's .yu was phased out in 2010 after a transition to .rs and .me. Zaire's .zr became the Democratic Republic of the Congo's .cd.

And the mechanism has teeth going forward. The United Kingdom has agreed to hand the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius. If IO leaves the ISO list, the retirement clock starts on .io, which is not a sleepy relic but the domain of choice for half the software industry.

A ccTLD is not a name. It is a lease, and the landlord is a standards committee.

Two domains with nothing in them

Norway administers two entries in the ISO list that most people have never heard of. Bouvet Island, an uninhabited volcanic rock in the South Atlantic, has the code BV. Svalbard and Jan Mayen has SJ.

Both have domains. The names .bv and .sj exist in DNS, no subdomains have ever been assigned under either, and Norwegian policy is to assign none.

They are real, they resolve, and they contain nothing. The internet has two empty rooms with the lights on, because a standards list said those places existed and the rules said places on the list get a domain.

Neither is a country, which is the clearest possible illustration of what a ccTLD actually is. Not a nation. A row in a table.

Western Sahara, meanwhile, is eligible for the code EH and has never had a domain assigned at all. The row exists. The room was never built.

Ways people actually use this

• Domain hunting. Generate a few and see which two-letter codes make words. This is how .io, .ly, .me and .tv all became businesses rather than country domains.
• Quiz rounds. Show the domain, ask for the country. .ch and .de will catch almost everyone.
• Building a country dropdown. If you need ISO 3166 alpha-2 codes for a form, the domain is the code with a dot in front of it, most of the time.
• Teaching how the internet inherited its map. One click, one pair, one story about a standards committee.
• Checking your own assumptions. Most developers can name maybe fifteen of these and think they can name fifty.

Getting more out of the filters

• Set Ends with to K and you get the countries whose domain finishes in K: Denmark, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Slovakia, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom. Only one of those is spelled with a K.
• Type a single letter into Contains with a dot in front of it, like .a, and you pull every domain beginning with that letter.
• Starts with matches the country name, because the country name comes first in each entry. To search by domain instead, use Contains.
• If a filter gives you fewer than you asked for, there are not that many matches. Loosen it and run again.

Questions people ask

What is a ccTLD?

A country code top-level domain. The two letters at the end of a web address that stand for a country, like .np or .jp. They are always exactly two letters, and every two-letter top-level domain is one.

Who decides which country gets which letters?

Nobody, in the sense you mean. IANA takes the two-letter codes from ISO 3166 and delegates the domain to an operator in that country. The letters were decided by the standards committee, usually decades earlier and for other reasons entirely.

Why is the UK .uk and not .gb?

Because the British academic network had already adopted "uk" before the domain name system's root was set up. The .gb domain was created for a migration that never happened, and it sits nearly empty in the root to this day.

Does the Soviet Union still have a domain?

Yes, .su, more than thirty years after the country dissolved. ICANN has begun the retirement process, with a phase-out currently aimed at 2030.

Why do so many startups use .io and .ly?

Because those are country domains that happen to spell useful things. The letters were assigned to territories for administrative reasons, and the internet found a second use for them that nobody intended.

References

1. IANA Root Zone Database
2. ISO 3166 country codes
3. Discussion paper on retiring country code top-level domains, ICANN
4. ICANN moves to retire the Soviet-era .su domain
5. .gb
6. Country code top-level domain