Quantitative base for Domain Name Appraisal
Fig. 1 Distribution of words length.
In this article I would like to focus on quantitative factors that form the base for domain name price estimation and particularly the number of characters and number of words in domain name. It is well known that the less characters and words in the name, the more desirable it is.
Simple questions that I want to answer are:
- How many domain names can be generated with fixed length and arbitrary combination of characters?
- How many domain names can be generated that are combination of 1, 2, 3 or more dictionary words?
For this study I have compiled a dictionary of US and UK English words (totally 101,930 words and names) . I will not estimate domain names that contain words from other languages. Distribution of words length is shown on Fig.1.
It is easy to count number of all possible domain names with letters “a…z” (see table below). I will omit numbers and “-” for now.
| Name Length | 1 Word | 2 Words | 3 Words | 4 Words | # Total Combinations |
| 4 | 3,118 | 20,620 | 11,232 | 1,296 | 456,976 |
| 5 | 6,426 | 207,352 | 282,924 | 89,856 | 11,881,376 |
| 6 | 10,534 | 1,393,145 | 4,520,456 | 3,042,144 | 308,915,776 |
| 7 | 14,505 | 6,557,828 | 50,892,618 | 66,396,864 | 8,031,810,176 |
| 8 | 15,852 | 22,587,140 | 426,332,664 | 1,043,041,432 | 208,827,064,576 |
| 9 | 14,856 | 60,492,356 | 2,748,432,685 | 12,500,650,016 | 5,429,503,678,976 |
| 10 | 12,491 | 134,160,158 | 13,981,916,226 | 118,442,764,472 | 141,167,095,653,376 |
Notes:
- The numbers are just estimates. They dependent from dictionary size and especially the number of small words.
- Some domain names can be split in words in multiple ways. Famous example is “who represents” and “whore presents”.
- Not all words combinations create meaningful domain names, most of them not.
Work in progress …