The .ws domain is the country-code top-level domain for Samoa. It was assigned as Samoa’s Internet country code and is administered by SamoaNIC for the Samoan government.
The letters “ws” come from “Western Samoa,” the country’s former official name when two-letter country codes were standardized. Samoa officially changed its name from Western Samoa to Samoa in 1997, but the existing .ws code remained in use.
Although .ws is a national domain, it has also been marketed internationally with meanings such as “website,” “web service,” or “world site.” That broader marketing helped make it popular for domain hacks, URL shorteners, and memorable registrations beyond Samoa itself.
The registry began allowing emoji-domain registrations in 2016, which gave .ws a prominent role in the emoji-domain market. This does not mean that .ws stands for emoji or that it is a generic top-level domain; technically, it remains a country-code TLD.