Domain jargon is mostly historical accident. The words below are the ones you will actually run into — in your client area, in a registrar’s control panel, or in an email telling you something needs your attention.
They are in alphabetical order. Nothing here assumes you have read anything else.
A record
The DNS record that points a name at an IPv4 address, which is what makes a website load. AAAA is the same idea for the newer IPv6 addresses, and plenty of sites have both. Your hosting provider tells you which address to use. More detail in DNS records explained.
Auth code
The password that authorises moving a domain to a different registrar. Also called an EPP code, a transfer key, or an authorization code — four names, one thing. You request it from the registrar you are leaving and hand it to the one you are joining. Codes can expire, so get yours when you are ready to start. See how to transfer a domain.
Auto-renew
A setting that renews your domain automatically before it expires. It is the single most effective protection against losing a name, because the alternative is remembering a date once a year. On by default for domains registered with us, and switchable in your client area.
ccTLD
A country-code top-level domain — two letters tied to a country or territory, like .uk, .de, or .au. Some are open to anyone in the world, some require a local presence, and each is governed by its own country’s rules rather than by ICANN. Every extension’s page in the directory says which applies.
CNAME
A DNS record that points one name at another name rather than at an address. Useful when a provider gives you a hostname to aim at instead of a fixed IP. A CNAME cannot sit on the bare root of your domain — that needs an A record, or your DNS host’s ALIAS equivalent.
DNS
The Domain Name System: the internet’s address book. It translates names people can remember into the addresses machines actually use. Everything below about records, nameservers, and TTL is a part of how it does that.
DNS record
A single instruction in your domain’s DNS, with a type that says what it is for — A for a web server, MX for mail, TXT for verification. Together they make up your zone. DNS management is free on every domain registered with us.
Domain name
The name itself — example.com. Made of a label you choose (example) and an extension you pick from what is available (.com). You do not buy it outright; you hold the exclusive right to use it for as long as you keep renewing.
Expiry
The date your registration runs out. It is not a cliff: most extensions give you a grace period to renew at the normal price, then a redemption period at a much higher one, then the name is released. What happens when a domain expires walks through the whole timeline.
Glue record
An address published at the registry for a nameserver that lives inside the domain it serves. Without it the lookup is circular: to find example.com you must ask ns1.example.com, which you cannot find without first finding example.com. Glue breaks the loop. You only meet this if you run your own nameservers.
gTLD
A generic top-level domain — the extensions not tied to a country. The originals (.com, .net, .org) plus the several hundred newer ones (.app, .shop, .tech). These are the extensions ICANN oversees directly, which is why gTLD rules on transfers and expiry are consistent across registrars.
ICANN
The organisation that coordinates the domain name system globally: it accredits registrars, sets the rules gTLD registries and registrars must follow, and publishes what you are entitled to as a registrant. Its registrant rights page is worth a read if a registrar ever tells you something you doubt.
IDN
An internationalised domain name — one containing characters outside basic ASCII, like café.com or a name in Arabic or Devanagari. Behind the scenes these are encoded into an ASCII form beginning xn--, which is why an IDN sometimes appears as an unreadable string in technical output.
MX record
The DNS record that says where email for your domain should be delivered. If your mail stops working after a DNS change, this is almost always the record that went missing. Note your MX records before changing nameservers — see DNS records explained.
Nameserver
A server that answers DNS questions about your domain. Your domain points at a set of them (usually two to four), and whoever runs those nameservers controls every DNS answer for the name. Changing nameservers replaces your entire zone — every record, MX included — which is why it is the one change worth planning.
Propagation
The delay between changing a DNS record and the whole internet seeing the change. It is not really a spreading process; it is caches expiring, one at a time, governed by the record’s TTL. Usually 15 to 60 minutes. Occasionally up to 48 hours, because some providers cache for longer than they were asked to.
Registrant
You — the person or organisation a domain is registered to. The registrant contact in the WHOIS record is who a registry treats as the owner, which is why keeping that email address current matters more than it looks. Approval emails for transfers go there.
Registrar
The company you buy and manage a domain through, accredited to write records into a registry on your behalf. We are a reseller working through ICANN-accredited registrars; your registration is real and portable either way, and you can transfer it out whenever you like.
Registrar lock
A flag on your domain that blocks transfers until you switch it off. It exists to stop somebody moving your name without permission, so it is on by default and slightly buried by design. You turn it off yourself at your current registrar when you genuinely do want to move.
Registry
The operator of a single extension, holding the master list of every domain under it. Verisign runs .com; Public Interest Registry runs .org; each ccTLD has its own. Registries set the price floor, the eligibility rules, and the expiry timeline for their extension — which is why those differ so much between extensions.
Redemption period
Roughly 30 days after an expired domain is removed from the zone, during which only you can recover it — at a redemption fee well above a normal renewal. Your site and email are already down by this point. After it ends, the name is deleted and anyone may register it.
Root zone
The top of the DNS hierarchy: the authoritative list of every extension that exists, published by IANA. If an extension leaves the root zone it stops resolving worldwide. We remove withdrawn extensions from our catalogue automatically for exactly that reason.
Second-level domain
A registrable namespace one level below an extension — co.uk, com.au, co.nz. To you it behaves like any other extension: you register yourname.co.uk the same way you would register yourname.com. There are 232 of them in our directory, alongside the top-level ones.
SSL certificate
The credential that lets a site be served over HTTPS, encrypting traffic between a visitor and your server and removing the “Not secure” warning browsers show without it. DV verifies you control the domain, OV additionally verifies your organisation, and a wildcard covers all your subdomains at once. See SSL certificates; a free one is included with every hosting plan.
Subdomain
A name below your domain — blog.example.com, shop.example.com. You create as many as you like from your DNS at no cost; they are not separate registrations and there is nothing to buy. Only the domain itself is registered.
TLD
Top-level domain: the part after the final dot. .com, .uk, .tech. Often just called the extension. Our directory covers 1,669 of them and their second-level namespaces, with eligibility rules and pricing for each.
TTL
Time To Live, in seconds: how long other servers may cache a DNS answer before checking again. A TTL of 3600 means an old value can survive an hour after you change it. Lower the TTL a day before a planned migration and the cutover happens in minutes rather than hours.
TXT record
A DNS record holding plain text, used mostly to prove you control the domain. Verification strings from Microsoft or Google are TXT records, and so are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — the three that stop your legitimate email being treated as spam.
WHOIS
The public record of who registered a domain, when, through which registrar, and when it expires. Increasingly redacted for privacy reasons, but the registrar, dates, and status flags remain visible — which is what makes it useful for diagnosing a stalled transfer.
WHOIS privacy
A service replacing your personal contact details in the public WHOIS record with a forwarding address, keeping your name, home address, and phone number out of a database anyone can query. Free with us on every extension whose registry permits it. Turn it off temporarily during a transfer, so the approval email reaches you.
Zone
The complete set of DNS records for your domain. “Editing your zone” and “editing your DNS records” mean the same thing. Switching nameservers hands the zone to a different provider, which is why the old records do not come along unless you recreate them.
Still stuck on a word?
If something in an email or a control panel does not match anything here, that is worth telling us — it usually means a provider has invented its own name for one of the above. Send us a message or open a ticket and we will translate it.