All 620 short English words are already taken
We checked every common English word of three to six letters against .com and .net. That is 1,240 live registry lookups, no errors, and not one name free on either extension.
Every unique word of three to six letters in Permutica's 900-word common-English list, 620 of them, queried against the .com and .net RDAP services on 13 September 2026. 1,240 lookups, no failures, no sampling.
There is a particular kind of hope involved in typing a single word into a domain search. Not a compound, not a coinage. The word itself, the one your product actually is. We ran that hope against the registry 1,240 times and it did not survive once.
Every unique word of three to six letters in our common-English list went to the .com and .net RDAP services on 13 September 2026. That is 620 words, checked twice over, with no sampling and no failed lookups. Zero came back free.
The same answer at every length
The result does not soften as the words get longer, which is the part we expected to be wrong.
| Length | Words | .com free | .net free |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 letters | 88 | 0 | 0 |
| 4 letters | 215 | 0 | 0 |
| 5 letters | 165 | 0 | 0 |
| 6 letters | 152 | 0 | 0 |
| All | 620 | 0 | 0 |
Six-letter words are a much larger space than three-letter ones, and on .com about 97% of six-letter strings were unregistered when we measured them a day earlier. The words are the exception. A registrar can hold every English word of usable length in a spreadsheet, and somebody did, a long time ago.
.net is not the back door
The interesting column is the second one. On four-letter strings generally, .net is nothing like .com. We found roughly 55% of random four-letter .net names unregistered, against none at all on .com. There are even five two-letter .net domains left, which is five more than .com has.
That gap closes completely at the word list. Whatever makes .net roomier than .com does not extend to table or season or garden. The names people would actually type went first on both, and they went early enough that the difference in the extensions' popularity never had a chance to matter.
What we could not check
.io and .ai are missing from the table on purpose. Both are served by the same RDAP host, and it refused a sustained sweep. One run failed 1,276 times in a row, at a request rate that individual spot checks survive perfectly well. A smaller probe of 40 of these words found none free on either, which is suggestive and is not the same as having checked.
We would rather publish two extensions we measured completely than four we measured partly.
Where that leaves a name
The vocabulary is not coming back. What is available is everything adjacent to it. Invented words that read like words, compounds, and the enormous unclaimed space two letters longer than the one you wanted. None of that is a consolation prize so much as the actual market, because the dictionary stopped being the market around the time most of these registrations were made.
Common questions
- Are any one-word .com domains still available?
- Not among common English words at these lengths. All 620 words of three to six letters in our list were registered on .com on 13 September 2026, and all 620 were registered on .net too. Longer and rarer words do still turn up free, but the everyday vocabulary is gone.
- Is a newer extension any better for one-word names?
- Not in the sample we could measure. An earlier spot check of 40 of these words found none free on .io or .ai either. The registries for those two blocked a full sweep, so we publish the .com and .net numbers and say what we could not finish.
- What is left if the word I want is taken?
- Two letters more than you think. On .com about 79% of five-letter strings and 97% of six-letter strings were unregistered when we checked on 12 September 2026. Those are invented names rather than dictionary words, but nobody has claimed them.
Run it yourself
The construction this piece measures: Adjectives + Brandable Nouns on ..com. Nothing runs until you click search.