gethostbyname return ip of non existing host

Question

I use gethostbyname and pass the string "10.33" to the function. This host does not exist:

host 10.33
Host 10.33 not found: 3 (NXDOMAIN)

However, gethostbyname returns the following:

phostent = gethostbyname ("10.33");
inet_ntoa (* (struct in_addr *) phostent-> h_addr_list [0]): 10.0.0.33>

Unfortunately, I don't quite understand the behavior