Heh, I already thought of this and wrote a little Go script to locate them all last May when I was choosing my new company name. I now have a 5-letter company name and a corresponding 3-letter .io domain name.
I had initially considered various strategies for mining longer names, using an algorithm to find English words and word-likes strings, but in the end there were so many .io domains that I couldn't not do this. The list was still sufficiently short that it only took a few hours to go through it manually and shortlist about half a dozen potential names, from which I chose what I considered to be the best one.
I'll save you all some effort and confirm that there are no real words left, unless someone has allowed one to lapse in the last year or so (which seems unlikely).
You might find the occasional acronym though. For example, as someone who mostly learned to code in MSX Basic, I was quite pleased to find msx.io wasn't taken. I plan to do something with it when I have some spare time (it's just a holding page for now).
No real words? I just ran my script through a list of the most common english words, and it returned 4k .IO domains. I'll post them if anyone's interested.
I had initially considered various strategies for mining longer names, using an algorithm to find English words and word-likes strings, but in the end there were so many .io domains that I couldn't not do this. The list was still sufficiently short that it only took a few hours to go through it manually and shortlist about half a dozen potential names, from which I chose what I considered to be the best one.
I'll save you all some effort and confirm that there are no real words left, unless someone has allowed one to lapse in the last year or so (which seems unlikely).
You might find the occasional acronym though. For example, as someone who mostly learned to code in MSX Basic, I was quite pleased to find msx.io wasn't taken. I plan to do something with it when I have some spare time (it's just a holding page for now).