What do you mean by a domain name

On the Internet, a domain consists of a set of network addresses. This domain is organized in levels. The top level identifies geographic or purpose commonality (for example, the nation that the domain covers or a category such as "commercial"). The second level identifies a unique place within the top level domain and is, in fact, equivalent to a unique address on the Internet (an IP address). Lower levels of domain may also be used.
Most computers connected to the Internet are identified by a unique number called an IP address (for instance, 234.208.12.129). IP addresses are neither intuitive (they don't correspond to a geographical location) nor easy to remember (you can prove that by glancing away from this page and then trying to quote the example IP address above!)

If you type the IP address into the URL bar of your browser you will be taken to the web site it relates to. As well as being hard to remember, however, IP addresses are also FIXED (i.e. if you change web hosting companies you'll need to get a new IP address for your site).

Domain names offer a more intuitive way to name and find a website. Each domain name replaces a string of meaningless numbers (an IP address) with a simple word or expression. That's the theory - in practice, domain names can be pretty obscure too.

Every domain name has a suffix that indicates which top level domain (TLD) it belongs to. There are only a limited number of such domains. For example:
gov - Government agencies
edu - Educational institutions
org - Organizations (nonprofit)
mil - Military
com - commercial business
net - Network organizations
ca - Canada
th - Thailand

Here are a few examples of domain names that you may already be familiar with. They belong to well-known companies or organizations.

ibm.com
apple.com
microsoft.com

When you use the Web or send an e-mail message, you use a domain name to do it. For example, the URL "http://www.managementheaven.com" contains the domain name managementheaven.com. So does the e-mail address "contact@managementheaven.com"

Human-readable names like "managementheaven.com" are easy for people to remember, but they don't do machines any good. All of the machines use names called IP addresses to refer to one another. For example, the machine that humans refer to as "www.managementheaven.com" has the IP address 69.51.196.72. Every time you use a domain name, you use the Internet's domain name servers (DNS) to translate the human-readable domain name into the machine-readable IP address. During a day of browsing and e-mailing, you might access the domain name servers hundreds of times!

Domain name servers translate domain names to IP addresses.
There are billions of IP addresses currently in use, and most machines have a human-readable name as well. There are many billions of DNS requests made every day. A single person can easily make a hundred or more DNS requests a day, and there are hundreds of millions of people and machines using the Internet daily.

Domain names and IP addresses change daily.
New domain names get created daily.
Millions of people do the work to change and add domain names and IP addresses every day.

The DNS system is a database, and no other database on the planet gets this many requests. No other database on the planet has millions of people changing it every day, either. That is what makes the DNS system so unique.

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