Survey of Four-Letter Domains

In March 2002 I conducted a survey of four-letter .com domains currently reserved on the Web. There are 456,976 (26⁴) such domains, so I probably annoyed the whois server administrators. Here are some statistics on what I found:

Four-letter domains reserved as of March 2002: 257,400 (56.3%)

Percentage of palindromic domains (adda, zyyz, etc.) reserved: 93.5%

Percentage of domains containing 'faq' reserved: 46 out of 52 (88.5%). The ones not yet registered are faqj, faqk, faql, faqo, faqr, and faqv.

I have only found two four-letter words that have not been registered: tahr, a wild mountain goat, and yirr, listed as an echoic in the OED and found in Burns.

Here are some more statistics:

Registration rate for domains beginning with a certain letter:
- Most popular:
  - a: 72.7%
  - w: 70.4%
  - t: 68.0%
  - u: 66.4%
  - i: 66.3%
- Least popular:
  - v: 37.6%
  - y: 34.2%
  - z: 33.6%
  - x: 32.1%
  - q: 26.7%
Registration rate for domains containing a certain letter:
- Most popular:
  - a: 72.7%
  - s: 70.9%
  - c: 68.3%
  - i: 67.4%
  - t: 65.5%
- Least popular:
  - v: 43.7%
  - y: 41.8%
  - x: 35.6%
  - z: 32.9%
  - q: 22.2%
Registration rate for domains containing a given two-letter pair:
- Most popular:
  - us: 91.4%
  - in: 90.1%
  - ma: 90.0%
  - sa: 89.5%
  - as: 88.8%
- Least popular:
  - gq: 10.3%
  - qv: 10.3%
  - qk: 10.2%
  - vq: 9.3%
  - fq: 8.9% (46 of the 50 least popular two-letter pairs contain q. The most popular q-pairs are iq, hq, and aq.)

If you want to calculate some more statistics, download the list of found domains and the list of words with no match. If you find something cool, let me know and I will credit you here.

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