Chinese URL’s

When one of my colleagues in China resigned, he sent his personal mail id to keep in touch. It read something like this: xxx@163.com (I felt it was a bit weird that a site had only numbers on it but I didn’t give it any further thought).

When I Google’d a bit though, I was surprised to find that it is, in fact, very common for Chinese sites to have only numbers! Christopher Beam gives many such examples:

“For example, the massive online retailer Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if that takes too long to type, 3.cn. Check out 4399.com to see one of China’s first and largest online gaming websites. Buy and sell used cars at 92.com. Want to purchase train tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.”

This seems insane. Wouldn’t it be much harder, if not impossible, to remember so many numbers, I wondered? Why would anyone choose numbers instead of letters for their website?

Beam found the answer, and it makes perfect sense once you hear it:

“To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you understand the word…To many, “Hotmail.com” might as well be Cyrillic.”

And while numbers aren’t exactly native to the Chinese, they are the lesser of the two aliens:

“And yes, Arabic numerals (1-2-3) are technically just as much a foreign import as the Roman alphabet (A-B-C). But most Chinese are more familiar with numbers than letters.”

Ok, you say. But isn’t a random string of numbers hard to remember? Well, that’s the thing: they are not exactly random. For example:

“The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply reappropriated their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and 10010.cn, respectively.”

Other sites use a different approach to pick their digits:

“(Keep in mind that) the words for numbers are homophones for other words. The URL for the massive e-commerce site Alibaba, for example, is 1688.com, pronounced “yow-leeyoh-ba-ba”—close enough!”

But why not just use the Mandarin script for site names? Devices would need separate plug-in’s for the script, and it would take longer to type on a phone anyway than keying in a few digits.

As Shakespeare said, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.”