Bulk availability checker

What this tool does

Paste up to 100 names, one per line, with or without an ending, and every one is checked against the registry. Names without an ending are checked as .com, which is a safe default rather than always the right one: .com, .net and .org each signal something different, and the default is there so a bare list still answers something useful.

This is the tool for a shortlist you already have. If you are still generating candidates, the name generator is the other door into the same data.

Reading the three answers

Each line comes back available, taken, unknown, or invalid.

Taken means registered to someone. It does not mean unobtainable — a great many registered names are parked, abandoned, or for sale. The WHOIS lookup will tell you when one expires, which is the useful part: a name expiring in three weeks is a different prospect from one renewed for another decade last month. It will not tell you who holds it, because registrant details are redacted by default; the route to an owner is the registrar's forwarding address or web form.

Unknown means the registry could not be asked. Some endings, .co among them, publish no RDAP service this tool can reach, so there is no answer to give and we would rather say so than report a name as free when nobody checked. Invalid is about the shape of the name rather than who holds it, and it is rarer than you would expect: a line is cleaned up before it is checked, so spaces, stray punctuation and surrounding hyphens are stripped rather than rejected. What survives to be called invalid is a line with nothing usable left in it.

Available means the registry has no record of it right now. It does not promise a price: some unregistered names are classed by the registry as premium and cost far more than the rate card. Checkout re-checks both availability and price before taking any money, and refuses rather than surprising you.

Accented and non-Latin names

Domain names are restricted to a narrow set of characters — letters a to z, digits, and the hyphen. That is not a limit of the DNS itself, which carries arbitrary bytes, but the host-name convention everything built on top of it assumes, and registries enforce it. Everything else, from an accented é to Hebrew or Chinese, is encoded into that set first. The encoded form begins xn-- and is what the registry actually stores.

So a name in your own script is not rejected by the system, it is converted by it. Convert it before pasting it here, because this tool strips what it cannot use rather than converting for you — and a stripped name is worse than a refused one. Paste café.com and you get a confident answer about caf.com, which is a different domain.

Worth knowing before you build a brand on one: support outside browsers is uneven. Mail clients, older software and some registries handle these names poorly, and a name that mixes scripts can be refused outright by the registry as a spoofing risk.

Common problems

A list is checked in one go, every line at once, and the whole set comes back together — so a hundred names takes as long as the slowest single lookup rather than a hundred lookups in a row. Results are cached for two minutes, which is short enough to stay honest and long enough that re-running the same list is free.

A list that comes back entirely invalid is usually a formatting problem rather than a hundred bad names. Commas instead of line breaks is the common one; so is pasting from a spreadsheet column that carried trailing spaces.

Checking the same name repeatedly will not catch the moment it drops. Expiring names go through a redemption period and a pending-delete window before they are released, and the release itself is contested by services built for it. The expiry date from a WHOIS lookup tells you more than polling ever will.