| Summary: The Urban Dictionary is a street slang dictionary that allows users to provide, define and even debate what a given contemporary work or idea means In addition, the Urban Dictionary is one of the virtual world's answers to two challenging realities: a fast moving national lexicon and the growing demand of users to be part of a word's definition process. |
The Urban Dictionary (founded in 2003) is one of the virtual world’s answers to two challenging realities: a fast moving national (or perhaps planetary) lexicon and the growing demand of users to be part of a word’s definition process.
The Urban Dictionary is a street slang dictionary that allows users to provide, define and even debate what a given contemporary work or idea means. It promotes fairly standard definition formats as well as humorous and in many instances vulgar personalized presentations of what the concept means in practice. The Urban Dictionary is clearly intended to capture a word in its evolutionary action - just as it might actually be used on the streets, across the nation or in your child’s conversation.
Users can access the site’s database by searching for particular words or concepts or by clicking on tabs in the alphabet. However, using the tabs can be challenging since capturing the language as it is being used does not necessarily conform to traditional rules or expectations, such as those presented in an Oxford English Dictionary, for example.
Thus, when a user seeks to look up a word or phrase (such as “cool person”) he or she may find generic descriptions of cool in a variety of manifestations, often times highly personalized or graphic. For example, an actual search for “cool person” turned up various usages as well as concepts such as “Person C” (a third character of a fictional presentation of personality styles who is deemed “cool”) or “Tre Cool,” a drummer from a particular band.
The idea behind the UD is grounded in the concept of Open Source (or Wiki) technology. Open Source ideas were first introduced by early software programmers who sought to test programming language by making it freely available to other “experts” (formal and informal) with the idea of working out the bugs. It assumed that by turning over this technical language to the masses of democratic experts, a more realistic, user-friendly technology project would result.
One of the most well known and widely praised of the evolution of this idea is the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org), an online virtual encyclopedia started in 2001 that currently has 800,000 articles provided through public participation. A Wiktionary (http://wiktionary.org) is also under development with over 100,000 entries to date.
The UD is defined as being “infectious.” The dictionary grows more accurate, they say, and more addictive, with hundreds of new definitions being added every day. According to their site’s promotions, UrbanDictionary.com has in excess of 140,000 daily users, most of who are male (53%), from North America (75%) and under the age of 35 (82%). Like other online sites, this resource maintains instantaneous audience assessments of its users and demographics to promote acceptance, convenience for the media and profitability for advertisers.
The number of words and definitions grows every day. Static and active banners on the front page demonstrate promotional definitions using terms that are included.
In November 2005 the printed version of the Urban Dictionary became available, self-defined as being a “fularious” resource that presents some 2000 of their “funniest, smartest, crunkest defs.”
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