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ICANN signs contracts for .wang and .democrat
Kevin Murphy,
October 25, 2013, 14:12:08 (UTC),
Domain Registries
The new gTLD applicants behind .wang and .democract are the latest to sign Registry Agreements with ICANN.
Demand Media’s United TLD is behind .democrat, while .wang was applied for by small Chinese portfolio applicant Zodiac Holdings. Both were uncontested applications.
Both are to be open gTLDs.
For .democrat, Demand expects names to be registered by anyone who identifies themselves as a democrat. There were no objections, and to the best of my knowledge no explicit support, from “Democrat” parties
.wang is a weird one.
It’s the Latin-script transliteration of the Chinese character 网, which means “net”. Zodiac couldn’t apply for the Chinese because it’s a single character, which are not yet allowed under ICANN rules.
I understand that 网 is often used by Chinese speakers to mean “network” or “website”, but I don’t know how commonly the ASCII “wang” is used instead. Seems like a stretch.
It also of course is a common Chinese surname and a juvenile euphemism for “penis”.
Chan, Lee, and Wang used to be top three most popular Chinese surnames (may have changed now, maybe Lee is No 1, not sure, have not checked). Next, are we going to see .lee, .chan, etc?
I’m living in Beijing, and as far as I know, Wang does not have such ” juvenile euphemism for “penis””. Where did you get the information?
No tin China, no. Elsewhere.
In English, mostly American English, the word “wang” is slang for penis. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no connection to the Chinese word. But it is the same string.
While 网 does transliterate to “wang,” it is not the surname “wang” in Chinese. The surname is 王, which also means “king.”
Both are pronounced closer to “wong” than “wang” (rhymes with “bang”) in Chinese.