IDN is short for Internationalized Domain Name. An IDN contains one or more native language characters and can contain letters or characters used in any other non-latin based language such as German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and even Arabic characters.
Centralnic is pleased to provide you with a vast variety of IDNs such as .EU, .DE, .ES, .GR and many more.
Domain name servers only support the English alphabet (A though Z), digits zero to nine and a couple punctuation marks like dashes and full stops. With those limitations in mind a system was developed called Punycode, which allows non-English characters to be accepted in domain name servers.
Punycode converts any non-English character into code that can be read by DNS. As an example, españa.com when converted using Punycode results in the domain xn--espaa-rta.com. After being converted by Punycode, the resulting domain is called an ACE String.
When you register an IDN Domain Name, you are registering the ACE String as these are supported by DNS since they do not contain any non-English characters.