An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many non-English languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese or Hindi. IDN was originally proposed in 1996 (by M. Duerst) and implemented in 1998-2001 (by T.W.Tan, James Seng, et al). Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) was adopted as the chosen standard, and has been rolled out in several top level domains.
