Of course you don't use IP addresses when you are accessing a website or sending internet e-mail you don't use IP addresses. Instead, you use "familiar" names such as www.thinkquest.org and   tq-help@advanced.org . That's because TCP/IP let us to use English-language equivalents of IP addresses alternatives are broken down into domain names and hosts names.

   When you register with the InterNIC, what you really doing is registering a domain name that is associated with your network.

   Even though domain names and host names look sort like IP addresses (a bunch of characters separated by dots), there is no formula that translates one into other. Instead, a process called name resolution is used to look up host names and domain names to find their underlying IP addresses (and vice versa). Three mechanisms are used to perform this task: the HOSTS file, Domain Name System, and the Windows Internet Name System.