Created in 1999 by a college student named Aaron Peckham, the Urban Dictionary combines "anyone can add information" with a dictionary. It has currently recorded over four million words and phrases, mostly slang or slang usage. New words, definitions, and examples are submitted and then approved by the votes of both users and visitors. After that, the new additions are displayed for the world to see, forever.
Many of the terms defined are derogatory or describe (likely fictional) sexual acts, so The Urban Dictionary is not exactly something a child should browse through unsupervised. It also gives personal opinions by contributors on certain subjects (bands, movies, books...), with contributors rarely considering the opinions of others. It can be useful for finding out how an unknown term is used, but don't trust it blindly; a significant fraction of the definitions are made up by the person contributing them. It's usually a good idea to read multiple definitions and decide for yourself which ones sound plausible.
Urban Dictionary offers a Word of the Day on its mainpage. For a long time, they allowed users to rate from the mainpage, resulting in large numbers of negative votes. This option was eventually disabled, largely preventing this.
Urban Dictionary can be found here
. If you want a user-contributed dictionary with legitimate words and definitions, you may want to consider Wikipedia's sister project Wiktionary.
Tropes:
- Author Tract: Most of the definitions tend to be personal opinions of the contributor. Look up any name you can think of, and you can divide the definitions almost perfectly down the middle by way of looking at positive vs. negative opinions on people in the users' lives with that particular name.
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: The 2nd definition for the word goose as of writing is "A ram is a ram, a donkey is an ass, and a ram in the ass is a goose".
- Comic Sutra: Almost every term will have at least one sexual definition, often one that's unlikely to exist outside the contributor's imagination.
- Does Not Like Men: Look up "man" and "misandry". The same person who wrote the definitions posted them over and over again.
- Fan Boy: Some celebrities have incredibly favorable definitions, which generally talk about how talented and beautiful they are.
- Foreign Culture Fetish: The term "Sabaton Effect" (named for the Swedish metal band) is defined as feeling Patriotic Fervor for countries one is not actually from, due to learning about dramatic moments in their history.
- Greeting Gesture Confusion: This is referred to as a braux pas.
- He-Man Woman Hater:
- The (formerly) most popular definition for "evil". Complete with Insane Troll Logic.
- A majority of the most upvoted definitions for "feminism," "feminist," "woman" and "women" were this before the pages were discovered by actual feminists.
- The (formerly) most popular definition for "evil"
- Improbably Low I.Q.: The most popular definition for "1" is "The IQ of President George Bush."
- Internet Jerk: Letting the Internet at large define (and often make up out of whole cloth) often sexual and offensive slang terms makes this a Foregone Conclusion.
- Logical Fallacies: Oh boy... to name just one blatant example the second-highest rated comment for "Slut-Shaming" insists that nobody who understands "true feminism" would have a problem with insulting promiscious women and any feminist who disagrees is a "RadicalNeo-feminist". Plenty more examples though.
- Luck-Based Mission: Up until 2021, every definition you write goes through a reviewal process that asks users if this should be on the site or not. It's a 50-50 chance that your new definition will appear on the site.
- Pet the Dog: With a combination of Everyone Has Standards, their definitions for the word "suicide" are surprisingly sensitive and anyone who tries to make an incendiary definition gets immediately downvoted.
- Popularity Power: When there's more than one definition of a given word published, they're sorted according to the ratio of up to down votes, with the top def being the one with the largest positive ratio of up votes to down votes (for example: [x word]: (top) def 1 (3up:1down), def 2 (2up:1down), def 3 (0up, 3 down)).
- Punny Name: Looking up "jack shit" will give you a Hurricane of Puns "genealogy" of Jack Schitt and his extended family, starting with his mother and father (Awe Schitt and O. Schitt).
- Schmuck Bait: The "look up any word, like X" above the search bar sometimes recommends searching for "sex". If you do, the top entry insults you.
- Self-Deprecation: Most of the definitions the site gives for "urbandictionary" mock the site itself and/or its contributors.
- Single-Issue Wonk: For a while on and in the days following Inauguration Day in January 2017, the daily definitions mostly consisted of Trump-related Take That! entries (plus "alternative facts", which is a meme/Take That! to political truth distortion in general).
- Stock "Yuck!": One definition for "girls who eat carrots" states that all girls hate carrots."They are not actual humans, they are fucking rabbits, don't trust a girl who says that they eat carrots, because girls hate carrots."
- Take That!: A lot of entries are little more than targeted insults against the topic being "defined" (arguably, that is part of the site's charm). For instance, "MTV" is just page after page mocking the Network Decay of MTV, rather than a listing of actual acronyms.
- Take That, Audience!:
- The first definition for "stupid"
- The first definition for "procrastinate"."What you are doing right now. Get the fuck going and finish your homework."
- The first definition for "stupid"
- Unreliable Narrator: Most of the definitions are way biased, or even entirely made up.
