150,000 new .co.uk domain names are registered every month, or three domains registered every minute, says UK naming outfit Nominet.

That makes registering domain names more popular than stealing cars in the UK - during 1999 an average of two cars were blagged every minute. So watch out for www.hotwire.co.uk and www.twoc.co.uk.*

Analysis of Nominet's figures reveals that the number of co.uk names registered hit a peak in March 2000, with 245,000 names registered, and is now running at around 150,000 per month.

Just over 10 per cent of the total number of domain names registered worldwide are now .co.uks. As of last month there were 17,804,717 domains registered worldwide - 9,482,427 were dot coms and 1,938,740 were .co.uks. After .com, .net and .org, .co.uk is the most popular country domain, followed by Germany's .de.

Other fascinating facts revealed by Nominet state that there are no three letter dot coms left and 97 per cent of the words in Webster's dictionary have already been registered as dot coms. ®

*For readers of a non-UK persuasion, Twoccing is a term used by young scallywags (aka joyriders) to refer to the practice of Taking Without Owner's Consent.