D. J. Bernstein
Internet publication
djbdns

Special DNS names

Names not controlled by the roots

The localhost and 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa domains are handled internally by DNS caches. localhost has the address 127.0.0.1; 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa has a pointer to localhost.

Numeric top-level domains are handled internally by DNS clients and by some DNS caches. For example, dnscache assigns an IP address of 1.2.3.4 to the domain name 1.2.3.4.

Other names embedded in software

in-addr.arpa is used to look up host names by address.

Human-oriented names

RFC 2606 reserves test for DNS implementation testing. It also reserves example and invalid and example.com and example.net and example.org for made-up examples.