I was looking for a domain name, got bored at not finding any I liked, so started looking for other, more specific domain names. I tried aaaaaa.com but this was taken, then aaaaaaa.com , then aaaaaaaa.com and so on. I was surprised by how many of these were registered.

So I began to wonder how may a’s it would take before there was a domain name that I could register. Then I expanded that to wonder about b and c …

Here, I wrote a script: `#!/bin/bash
whoischeck() {

FROM https://linuxconfig.org/check-domain-name-availability-with-bash-and-whois

whois $1.com | egrep -q ‘^No match|^NOT FOUND|^Not fo|AVAILABLE|^No Data Fou|has not been regi|No entri’
return $?
}lettercheck() { A=$1 for ((i=1;i<=64;i++)) do if whoischeck $A; then echo "$A.com is available" return fi A=$A$1 done }for l in a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
do
lettercheck $l
done`

Here are the results, these are the smallest single letter .com domains you can register (as of 21/7/2020): aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com bbbbbbbbbbb.com ccccccccccccccccccc.com ddddddddddddddd.com eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.com fffffffffffffffff.com gggggggggggggg.com hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.com iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.com jjjjjjjjjjjjjj.com kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.com lllllllllllllllllllllll.com mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.com nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.com oooooooooooooooooo.com pppppppppppppp.com qqqqqqqqqqqqqqq.com rrrrrrrrrrrrrr.com ssssssssssssssssss.com ttttttttttttttttt.com uuuuuuuuuuuuuu.com vvvvvvvvvvvv.com wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.com x*.com are all registered yyyyyyyyyyyyy.com zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.com

The fact that you can’t register a single x*.com domain name is pretty obvious why. But why does Alibaba own wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.com ?