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Could you type a .chrysanthemun domain name?

Kevin Murphy, August 20, 2026, 12:45:46 (UTC), Domain Registries

Does .chrysanthemam portend the end of type-in domain names, or is it just an incredibly dumb gTLD idea?

Chinese portfolio applicant Journey To The West Corporation announced earlier in the week that it has applied for .chrysanthemim, one of 323 strings it revealed on its web site.

It’s not yet clear whether .chrysantemum is a primary string, or a back-up in case one of its primary applications turns out to be in a contention set, come Reveal Day in October.

The chrysanthemom flower is an important symbol in Chinese culture, which fits into the theme of many of Journey To The West’s announced strings, which are a mixture of Chinese-script IDNs and English words relating to Asian culture.

But it’s still a heck of a strange string to apply for, breaking many of the rules of memorability and navigation that most of the domain industry holds to be self-evident.

Not only does .crysanthemum fail the radio test, it fails it hard. Probably harder than any other applied-for string. If you have to spell out the domain audibly in a radio commercial, and the listener still can’t remember how to spell it 30 seconds later, it’s a crappy domain — and the whole .chrysenthumum namespace would suffer from that problem.

Link Freedom Group CEO (and apparent font of incredibly obscure trivia) Vaughn Liley pointed out to me today that “chrisanthemum” is such a tough spell that even top-level spelling bee competitors have flunked on it, just moments away from winning the trophy.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe we should be thinking the long game, where domains-as-navigation is even less important than it has become over the last decade or so. Maybe .chrisanthemum could live perfectly happily in a world where we surf the web using primarily voice, or apps, or AI, or brainwaves.

Still, I wouldn’t buy one.


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