We’ve often seen TLDs repurposed. For instance, .ME and .TV – originally the country codes of Montenegro and Tuvalu, respectively – are mainly understood as words. While .SI means Slovenia in Slovenia, Spanish speakers might read it as “yes”. More recently, .PW has been marketed as a shorthand for “professional web”. Such extra interpretations can be either natural or forced. Some arise without prompting; some fail to catch on despite heavy promotion. Either way, they occur.
Another pitfall to watch out for is shown by .BOM (“film”) and .AN (“press”). Context is everything. “Film” in the sense of “membrane”, the skin on stagnant split pea soup – not Hollywood. “Press” in the sense of pushing, not publishing or journalism. Google even says .BE = “hungry”, although the dictionary suggests the opposite: “not hungry”.
Read MoreAlso, watch out for cases like .AG and .IST where Google’s Chinese output is really a mixture of alphabets. Be especially careful when a string of Chinese characters is not found as a unit within the dictionary but only as separate entries. These I’ve denoted with a “+” symbol...
