DNS is which type of naming system?

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Domain Name System is best described as a distributed hierarchical naming system. Names are arranged in a tree that starts at the root and branches into top-level domains (like com, org, net), then into second-level domains, and further into subdomains. This structure is not centralized; control is distributed among many administrators who manage individual zones. When you look up a name, your device asks a local resolver, which travels up and down the hierarchy—from root servers to top-level domain servers to authoritative servers for a specific domain—to obtain the IP address. The distributed nature lets the system scale across the entire Internet, while the hierarchical layout provides an organized, scalable method to locate any resource. While DNS uses a client-server interaction to perform lookups, the essential description of how the naming system itself is organized is as a distributed hierarchical naming system.