![]() It’s a quick way for 9-year-olds to learn without embarrassment what “T&A” is and an equally discreet way for boomers to study the nuances of “booty.” A ranking system means that the best definitions make it to the top of the list. Every single word on here is written by someone with a point of view, with a personal experience of the word in the entry.”īetter, then, to accept at the outset that Urban Dictionary is not a lexicographical project at all. its neutral point of view,” he told me by phone. This chaos seems to please Aaron Peckham, the company’s founder and chief executive. It’s also packed with redundancies and made-up entries. Its sensibility, in fact, borders on the illiterate, which must be a first for a dictionary. You won’t find information about parts of speech, etymologies or even standard spellings in it. The population with the biggest ego stake in slang - divining it, protecting it, practicing it, spreading it, declaring it over - actually creates and patrols the content.Īlmost perversely, Urban Dictionary avoids most of the standard dictionary apparatus. ![]() In a typical month, 80 percent of its users are younger than 25. The site had 15 million unique visitors in April. With more than four million definitions submitted so far, and 2,000 more coming in every day, Urban Dictionary is a stunningly useful document that unlike most media is made and used by actual young people - in droves. That’s a lot of service from this exquisite and unorthodox resource, and it’s not atypical. ![]() I found a related entry that defined “tools” as people who wear Timberlands stylelessly and “think that they are ghetto when they are actually quite white.” After only a few minutes and some minimal triangulation of entries, I felt pretty confident about where the boots stood between farm and ghetto, the ’80s and the ’00s, tool and cool. Maybe the dictionary would also give my childhood’s unprintable but banal barnyard slang for the same boots. ”)Īt the time, my larger question was whether timbos, or anything else, could ever go back to the farm once they were anointed in song by the Wu-Tang Clan. (The usage example put to rest my query: “Man when we was runnin from the cops my timbos felt like air nikes on me. The first time I used Urban Dictionary, the online open-source dictionary of slang, I was looking for “timbos.” I thought I knew what the word meant - Timberland boots - but I hoped to discover whether timbos were still part of hip-hop style or had reverted back to being the farmwear I’d known as a kid. ![]()
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