Special Characters in Company Name

Applies to .ltd.uk and .plc.uk Internet Domain Names

The only characters from a registered company name allowed in a Internet Domain name are the letters A to Z, a to z, the numbers 0 to 9 and hyphen. These will be known as the "allowable" set.

Certain words will be removed from the registered company name where they occur at the end of the name before the Internet Domain name is generated, these are known as the "reserved" words. They are "limited", "public limited company" and the Welsh Language versions ("cyfyngedig" and "cwmni cyfyngedig cyhoeddus") along with the abbreviations of these words, e.g. ltd, plc, cyf and ccc.

The rules for company's Internet Domain Names are:

• One name per company name registered at Companies House

• The name shall correspond exactly to the registered name save for characters not in the "allowable" set that shall be interpreted as below and the "reserved" words. Where the definite article appears as the first word of the name it may be omitted

• White space between words shall either be ignored or replaced by a single hyphen "-"

• All other characters shall be removed

• Company names written in a non-English character set are not allowed.

Note: It is believed that these rules represent the way that Companies House interprets names in order to produce a unique match. In the event that they do not and/or that Companies House rules change in the future, the first successful applicant for a name will be assigned the name.

There is the possibility that applications will contain characters that are treated as significant and are not in the "allowable" set.