Count the letters in the names of the apps on your phone. A surprising number have five or fewer. Short names are easier to say, easier to remember and easier to fit on a small screen, and founders have known this for as long as there have been domain names.
The trouble is that the shortest .com addresses ran out a long time ago.
The arithmetic of short names
There are 17,576 possible three-letter combinations and 456,976 four-letter ones. Every one of them is registered as a .com, and the last free four-letter combinations were taken back in 2013. Most of those names are strings that only work as acronyms, and the few that read like words change hands for prices most startups cannot justify.
Five letters give 11,881,376 combinations. That sounds like plenty until you remove the ones nobody can pronounce. A name needs vowels in the right places, no awkward clusters and no unfortunate meaning in a big language. Apply those filters and the pool of good five-letter names shrinks to a small fraction, and much of that fraction is registered too.
That scarcity is why a well-shaped five-letter .com keeps its value. It is the shortest length at which a name can still be a real word you can say, rather than a set of initials.
What a good five-letter name sounds like
Most strong five-letter names follow one of two shapes. The first has two short syllables that flow into each other, like doiga.com, legda.com or ketiz.com. These names are soft and easy to say in almost any language. The second is a single syllable with a firm cluster of consonants, like velst.com or corsk.com. These sound decisive, which suits finance, security and industry.
Both shapes pass the tests that matter. You can say the name on a phone call and the other person can type it. You can print it in large letters on a van and in tiny ones on a browser tab. You can put it in front of people in different countries and none of them stumble.
Why the .com still matters
At the end of June 2026 there were about 401.6 million registered domain names across all extensions, and 166.6 million of them were .com, according to Verisign's quarterly industry brief. No other extension comes close. When people hear a brand name, .com is the ending they type without thinking, and it is the address they expect a serious company to own.
Owning the .com of your name also closes a side door. If you build a brand on another extension, the .com version belongs to someone else, and some of your visitors, your e-mail and your search traffic will drift there by habit.
What a five-letter .com costs, and why
Brandable five-letter .com names usually sell for a few thousand dollars up to the low five figures, with exceptional names going higher. The spread comes from sound, meaning and how many kinds of business could use the name. A name that works for a bank, a wine label and a software company has more possible buyers than one that fits a single niche.
For a new company, the more useful comparison is the cost of changing names later. A rebrand means new signs, new packaging, a new app listing, redirected links and months of explaining. Next to that, the price of the right name on day one is modest, and it can be spread out with a payment plan.
How to judge one before you buy
- Say it aloud to three people and ask them to write it down. If all three spell it the same way, the name passes.
- Look up the name in the languages of your main markets, and ask a native speaker about slang.
- Search the trademark databases in your key countries for the same or similar names in your line of business.
- Type it in the font you plan to use, at the size of an app icon and at the size of a shop sign.
- Check that it can grow. A name that fits your first product and your fifth is worth more than one tied to a single feature.
Every name in our catalog was chosen with these tests in mind. Browse them by industry, or tell us about your project and we will suggest five that fit.