What is “Pinyin”?
Pinyin is the
standard system for transliterating Chinese characters into the Romanized (Latin)
alphabet.
Premium Pinyin
letters are those individual Romanized letters that are considered to be prime in the Chinese
domain name market.
This Wikipedia article is somewhat complicated, but it
does offer some insight on how Chinese characters are translated into Roman
letters.
Also, this handy Pinyin chart, thanks to MandarinCapital.net,
may be of some help.
Now, let’s take a
look at individual letters, the so-called Premium Pinyin letters.
According to DotCN on Namepros, the following letters seem to
be in the top 10 of the Chinese premium Latin alphabet letters (in order of
importance):
S, C, Y, H, Z, J, A, D, T, X
FYI: If an “A” or “AA” is located at the
end of a word, it seems to be viewed as a premium letter/combination,
despite the opinion among some purists that all vowels are undesirable;
however, do your own research because this market is currently very volatile,
and opinions among even Chinese experts may differ!
DotCN admits that there may some
variation in opinion among Chinese domain buyers and sellers.
More about DotCN (Bill) in a DNSelect.com
interview.
Also, take a look
at DotCN’s website ohku.com, where you can view some of his own meaningful
four-letter Pinyin .com domains.
Some experts
insist that the Chinese market dislikes vowels (a,e,i,o,u) altogether, but it
all depends on usage...
Disclosure: Popular Pinyin domains (Romanized
Chinese words or acronyms) may
contain so-called non-premium letters, including vowels, and be very valuable, while
domains containing all-premium letters may
not mean anything at all in Chinese and actually be worth significantly
less than a meaningful domain with non-premiums and vowels.
One absolute certainty: the letter “V”
does not exist in Chinese Pinyin.
Any “V” domains
that we offer for sale are not presented as potential Chinese properties, but
they may be just fine for other markets.
This is why we
select short domains that also offer brandable possibilities for an
English-speaking market.
We simply acquire
domains that we like and offer them for sale.
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Other sources:
