Download Urban Dictionary
Joy Depiro
Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced English-language online dictionary for slang words and phrases. The website was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham. Originally, Urban Dictionary was intended as a dictionary of slang or cultural words and phrases, not typically found in standard English dictionaries, but it is now used to define any word, event, or phrase (including sexually explicit content). Words or phrases on Urban Dictionary may have multiple definitions, usage examples, and tags. As of 2014, the dictionary contains over seven million definitions, while around 2,000 new entries were being added daily.
The site was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham while he was a freshman computer science major at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He launched the site to compare urban slang used by university students in different parts of California. He had previously created a spoof version of the Ask Jeeves web search engine while studying at Cal Poly but closed the website after he received an infringement letter.[1] He created Urban Dictionary initially as a parody of actual dictionaries, which he thought tended to be "stuffy" and "take themselves too seriously".
Over a 30-day period in March and April 2011, 67,000 people wrote 76,000 new definitions for Urban Dictionary, while 3,500 volunteer editors were registered. In an April 2011 article in The Guardian titled "In praise of urban dictionaries", Peckham revealed an overview of 10 rules that he had devised for the site's content: "Publish celebrity names, but reject 'real life' names. Reject nonsense, inside jokes or anything submitted in capital letters. Racial and sexual slurs are allowed, racist and sexist entries are not."[8]
In the context of Urban Dictionary, "definitions" include not only literal definitions, but also descriptions. As such, "to define" a word or phrase on Urban Dictionary does not necessarily entail providing a strict definition; merely a description of some aspect of the word or phrase could suffice for inclusion in the dictionary.
Originally, Urban Dictionary was intended as a dictionary of slang, or cultural words or phrases, not typically found in standard dictionaries, but it is now used to define any word or phrase. Words or phrases on Urban Dictionary may have multiple definitions, usage examples, and tags.
As of 2013, Urban Dictionary has been used in several court cases to define slang terms not found in standard dictionaries. For example, the slang term "jack" was used to define the name the defendant used for his team, "the jack boys."[16] Urban Dictionary was also used in a District Court complaint where a man posted a threat on a gun exchange Facebook page to "murk that cocksucker".[7][16] The crowd-sourced dictionary was also used in a sexual harassment court case in Tennessee to define the phrase "to nut" as "to ejaculate".[16]
f5d0e4f075