![]() ![]() ![]() Not Exactly the Wild WestĪ 2010 paper by the linguist Lauren Squires suggests that, despite Urban Dictionary’s anarchic reputation, it can reproduce the idea of a division between proper and improper language, with internet language being deemed socially unacceptable. An example is Multicultural London English, sometimes oversimplified as “Jafaican,” for “fake Jamaican.” But Denis believes that Urban Dictionary’s applicability is broader: “It’s generally useful for not just young people and multiethnic areas but general for any speech community,” he says. In Denis’ research into Toronto’s multiethnic slang, he’s used Urban Dictionary to find the earliest documented use of terms like mans/ manz, meaning “I.” The wide-ranging, youth-oriented website might seem especially well-suited for recording this kind of multiethnolect: a dialect that draws from multiple ethnic groups, typically spoken by young people, and often stigmatized or dismissed. Urban Dictionary, unlike more formal dictionaries, mentions the Canadian association early and often. For him, the first example that comes to mind is the interjection eh. The other key aspect, he points out, is the use of Urban Dictionary to unearth indexical meanings, or the social meanings of words. McCulloch finds Urban Dictionary useful for mapping chronology, due to the datestamps attached to definitions, especially for the period in the early 2000s, before social media sites became behemoths.ĭerek Denis, a linguistics researcher at the University of Toronto, agrees that the datestamp function is useful. And Urban Dictionary is regularly cited as a source in linguistics research, such as a 2015 paper by Natasha Shrikant on Indian American students. Fox Tree uses Urban Dictionary, along with other examples of “public dictionary websites” (like Wikipedia and ), to excavate the uses of like in storytelling. It allows researchers to track terms that are too recent or too niche to appear in establishment dictionaries, and to determine how people are using English online.įor example, one 2006 paper by communication expert Jean E. Whatever we might think of its vulgarity, Urban Dictionary is useful. While Urban Dictionary’s speed may be useful in a legal setting, some lexicologists believe that depending on a crowdsourced dictionary is risky. Urban Dictionary’s definition of to nut, for instance, has been brought up in a sexual harassment claim, and the meanings of jack were debated in a financial restitution case. More serious is the continued tradition of dictionary use in legal cases, where the interpretation of a single word can have grave consequences. Urban Dictionary is being used to determine the acceptability of vanity plate names in some U.S. And according to internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s much-touted new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language: “ IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.” ![]() ![]() Its pages were saved to the Internet Archive more than 12,500 times between May 25, 2002, and October 4, 2019, with a steady increase over time. Urban Dictionary carries this legacy forward, and the site is likely to persist in some form. By 1785, Francis Grose’s Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue extended the slang lexicon beyond the middle-class conception, adding terms such as bum fodder (for toilet paper). The slang dictionaries of the seventeenth century were considered useful for clueing readers into the language of thieves and cheats, which itself was part of an older tradition of exoticizing the language of the poor and criminal. But it also continues a long history of recording low-brow language: dictionaries of English slang have been around in some form for centuries. With its crowdsourced definitions and high speed of coinage, Urban Dictionary is very much a product of the internet age. “IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.” ![]()
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