An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics (a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words), as required by many non-English languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese or Hindi. However, the standard for domain names does not allow such characters, and much work has gone into finding a way to internationalize domain names into a standard ASCII format, thereby preserving the stability of the domain name system.