Paint the pyramid. Dodge the cookies. Bait the Squatter. Reveal the true name.
The glyph you painted hides a true name the internet actually reads. Below: the domain you just played, a live decoder for any other — and, if you want it, the deep cut on how xn-- works.
Every glyph has two lives: the character people see, and the true name the internet reads. The face is ହ. The registrable name — the one DNS routes, WHOIS records, and certificates bind — spells PIC. Two forms. One asset. That's the whole game, literally.
Paste international text (ହ.com, 寸.xyz, 地球.xyz) or a punycode string (xn--…). The engine converts both ways — RFC 3492, entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere.
RFC 3492 bootstring · IDN labels · runs locally · edit either field
Tap a card to load it into the engine. Every true name below is computed live by this page's own encoder.
The short course. For the full decoder — script rooms, WebCards, Braille — go up a level to xndomain.com.
xn-- marks a punycode label: the ASCII form of a domain written in a non-Latin script. DNS only speaks plain ASCII — letters, digits, hyphens — so every internationalized name carries a public xn-- translation that lets it route anywhere on earth. It is not a glitch and not a hack. It's the web's translation layer, running quietly since 2003.
Punycode is bootstring (RFC 3492): ASCII characters copy straight through, then a compact variable-length code describes where the non-ASCII characters get inserted and which ones they are. A label maxes out at 63 characters; the whole domain at 253. The encoder on this page is the full spec, ~90 lines, no libraries.
Some characters impersonate others — a Cyrillic о is not a Latin o, but your eyes can't tell. Mixing scripts inside one label is the classic homograph attack signature, which is why browsers sometimes show you the raw xn-- form instead of the glyph. That's also why the ghost in the arcade is a Cyrillic һ pretending to be an h. The engine here flags mixed-script labels automatically.
xn-- true name (or paste an xn-- string to decode it).xn--, depending on script-safety rules.Appraisal systems were built for ASCII. When a native-script or single-glyph asset arrives, they misread it, flatten it to noise, or price it at zero. The asset isn't worthless — the reader is blind to it. Learning to read the true name is the whole advantage. Pricing and presentation live on the market surface: xndomains.com.