Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

The New York Times
July 5, 2009
The Medium
Street Smart: Urban Dictionary
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

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. (The usage example put to rest my
query:  Man when we was runnin from the cops my timbos felt like air
nikes on me. )

At 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. Maybe the dictionary would also give my childhood s
unprintable but banal barnyard slang for the same boots. It didn t. 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.

That s a lot of service from this exquisite and unorthodox resource, and
it s not atypical. 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. The site had 15 million unique visitors
in April. In a typical month, 80 percent of its users are younger than
25. 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.

Almost perversely, Urban Dictionary avoids most of the standard
dictionary apparatus. You won t find information about parts of speech,
etymologies or even standard spellings in it. Its sensibility, in fact,
borders on the illiterate, which must be a first for a dictionary. It s
also packed with redundancies and made-up entries. This chaos seems to
please Aaron Peckham, the company s founder and chief executive.  
Wikipedia strives for its N.P.O.V.   its neutral point of view,  he told
me by phone.  We re the opposite of that. Every single word on here is
written by someone with a point of view, with a personal experience of
the word in the entry.

Better, then, to accept at the outset that Urban Dictionary is not a
lexicographical project at all. Its wheelhouse is sociolinguistics. 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. Clunkers swiftly fall to the bottom.

But this community policing doesn t mean that Urban Dictionary contains
only actual words. Far from it. An entry is often likely to be an ad-hoc
neologism, invented just for this dictionary. Many contributors, then,
aren t defining pre-existing terms but rather suggesting communities in
which impressive, funny or complex experiences are so common that they
demand a shorthand to designate them. Language groups whose arcane
customs are hinted at in Urban Dictionary include corporate travelers (
ghetto upgrade ), pinball fans ( going multiball ), social networkers (
inbox rot ), dinner-party hosts ( buffer guest ), beer drinkers ( dÈjý