The Authentic Orthography
Founder of Daoism, Sage · Old master
Why lǎozǐ.com is the correct form
老子
The name in its original Chinese characters form. 老子 carries the full phonetic and orthographic weight of the source tradition.
LAOZI
Stripped of its identity, the name was reduced to plain Latin letters. The original orthography — stress, length, breathing — was erased by systems that only understand A-Z.
Lǎozǐ
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII destroyed. This is philological accuracy — not decoration. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
lǎozǐ.com → xn--loz-hdbm.com
The non-ASCII characters in Lǎozǐ are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Lǎozǐ.
How laozi becomes Lǎozǐ
| Step | ASCII | Unicode | Type | Scholarly Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | l | → | L | Same | Same, capitalized |
| 02 | a | → | ǎ | Special | Special character |
| 03 | o | → | o | Same | Same |
| 04 | z | → | z | Same | Same |
| 05 | i | → | ǐ | Special | Special character |
Why Lǎozǐ is classified as Tier-2 Basic
The Ancient form 老子 preserves neither stress nor length in this Unicode restoration. This makes it a single-tier Tier-2 Basic name — still a scholarly step above plain ASCII, but without the distinctive phonetic features that define higher tiers.
See how Lǎozǐ behaves in the PUNYCODEX Type Tool — with predictive autocomplete, character-by-character breakdown, and scholarly constraint validation.
laozi
→
Lǎozǐ