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IDN are domain names that are written in foreign languages, like Chinese, Japanese or Russian. IDN stands for Internationalized Domain Names. IDN domain names allow people from all over the world to communicate websites, domain names and URLs in their native languages.

Most domain names registered to date are written using the 26-character Latin/English alphabets and numbers, an encoding called ASCII. IDN allows for the use of non ASCII characters in domain names. When an IDN is registered, the foreign characters are encoded in Punycode using a number of algorithms. Punycode is simply an ASCII version for the IDN, allowing it to resolve with the current internet system.

Punycode domains can be identified by the "xn-" beginning.