Times Free Press features reporter Casey Phillips e-mailed a list of questions to Aaron Peckham, the founder of the popular online slang dictionary, urbandicitonary.com. These were his responses:
Q: Why did you originally found urbandictionary.com? Do you have some sort of interest in linguistics or was it just a way to keep track of the words your friends were using?
A: I started urbandictionary.com in 1999 as a parody of dictionary.com — the web pages looked almost exactly the same. The only difference was that all the definitions on urbandictionary.com were written by my friends and me. My friends started telling their friends, and their friends told their friends. Pretty soon Urban Dictionary had a lot of visitors from Australia adding their own definitions.
I think everyone has a hobbyist interest in words and language, and I definitely have that too!
Q: How have people reacted to it? How many hits do you get and how many new words are introduced to the dictionary on an average day?
A: About 500,000 people visit urbandictionary.com every day, and about 2,000 new words are sent in to urbandictionary.com every day. The site has about 1,000,000 definitions for 600,000 headwords (some headwords are defined more than once).
I never expected the site to be as big as it is today. Today I think it exists to document the vocabulary of everyday life — and I didn’t know it would be doing that when I started it. The web site kind of found its way by itself — people used it for their own purpose, when they added new funny, expressive definitions. I’ve just been trying to keep up!
Q: ** How does it feel to have your book included in reference sections? Is this something you expected (in other words, was the book supposed to be legitimate reference volume) or does it seem out of place to you?
A: In some book stores Urban Dictionary is listed in Humor, and in others it’s placed right next to Webster’s. It does seem a little out of place in Reference — Urban Dictionary doesn’t take itself as seriously as other slang dictionaries. It wasn’t heavily researched or fact-checked. There are a lot of joke definitions — check out the definition for “casual sex” on urbandictionary.com, that defines it as “sex that wears nice trousers and a nice looking polo shirt to work and parties". That’s in the book!
I think Urban Dictionary’s best definitions describe things we all experience — they give a name to common phenomena that might not have had a name before. Like “California Car Pool,” where you go to lunch with your friends, and everyone rides alone in their own car.
What I mean when I say Urban Dictionary doesn’t take itself as seriously, is that Urban Dictionary doesn’t require definitions to be objective or factual. Lots of definitions are extremely subjective or provably wrong! But every definition is written by a normal person, and I think that’s where Urban Dictionary’s value comes from: the entries are funny, honest and genuine. On the web site, other than deciding whether something should be published, editors can make no changes. They don’t change word choice, spelling or punctuation. Every definition is exactly how the author intended, so they’re all really individual and expressive!
Urban Dictionary’s authors are also mostly anonymous. Each definition is attached to a name, but it can be a pseudonym. On Urban Dictionary that’s valuable because I think people feel more free to express themselves when it’s anonymous.
Q: How long was it before your site took off? Were you lurking in the nether regions of the net for a long time before being noticed or was it pretty much instantaneous?
A: Urban Dictionary started getting more visitors around 2001. It was around then that urbandictionary.com was referenced by a judge in a UK court case — he was hearing a dispute between two rappers, and couldn’t figure out what they were saying. He went home and looked it up on urbandictionary.com, and talked about it in court the following day.
Q: How do you sort through the entries to decide which words are included and which aren’t? Is there a screening process?
A: All submissions to the site in the last few years have gone through a board of volunteer editors. Anyone can sign up to be an editor — when you do, you’ll be presented with a list of new definitions that were submitted recently. You have to decide whether they should be published or not. About 600 volunteer editors participate every week, and it’s a tough job! Overall they choose to publish less than half of the submitted definitions. I’ve given the volunteer editors ten guidelines to work from, because deciding whether to publish a definition can be a hard decision. Here are the guidelines:
1. Publish celebrity names but reject friends’ names.
2. Publish racial and sexual slurs but reject racist and sexist entries.
3. Publish opinions.
4. Publish place names.
5. Publish non-slang words. Ignore misspellings and swearing.
6. Publish jokes.
7. Reject sexual violence.
8. Reject nonsense. Be consistent on duplicates.
9. Reject ads for web sites.
10. Finally, publish if it looks plausible.
Q: How do you decide when a word has become outmoded and no longer slang?
A: To me, Urban Dictionary is more than a slang dictionary — it’s a catalog of popular culture. There are definitions for everything, from politicians’ names to car models. It’s a catalog of words and observations that people think are important. The other reason I think it’s more than a slang dictionary is that what’s slang to one person isn’t slang to another. Overall Urban Dictionary is a dictionary written by normal people, not necessarily one that focuses on one part of language. If people are using a word or a phrase, I think it should be in Urban Dictionary.
Except for definitions that break the ten rules above, nothing really gets removed from the web site. Everything is marked with the date it was written, so if there haven’t been many new definitions for “fo’ shizzle my nizzle” recently, maybe it’s gone out of style.
Q: Do you have any favorite entries? How many words have you personally added to the list?
A: I get a lot of laughs from Urban Dictionary. I read it a lot, and I think it’s my biggest connection to popular culture. For example, Urban Dictionary had a lot of definitions for “Don’t tase me, bro,” after University of Florida student Andrew Meyer was tasered at a John Kerry forum. Urban Dictionary also defines “the Iraq” and “everywhere like such as,” after Miss South Carolina’s awkward response to a question on the Miss Teen USA 2007 pageant.
The last words I added to Urban Dictionary were in 2001, so it’s been a long time since I added something myself.
Q: How did you decide which words would be included in the books? Are they just ones you liked or was there a voting process for the popular ones to be added?
A: The Urban Dictionary books are the best, funniest definitions from the web site. My friends and I picked them out, and it was a lot of work! The web site has a ton of definitions now — about 1,000,000 of them. That’s a lot of content to go through!
Q: Why did you feel a followup to the first Urban Dictionary was needed? Was the reaction to it so positive that you felt you should continue or are there just so many good words that one book couldn’t contain them all?
A: There’s enough new content on the site every day to write a new book! I think another volume was necessary because there are so many great new definitions. I think the books are great as a snapshot of the best of urbandictionary.com today — it’ll be a great reference in a few years when you’re trying to decipher MTV reruns of “Pimp My Ride.”
Q: Are all the words in volume 2 additions to the site after the first book was released or are some of them favorites or popular words that you missed/couldn’t find room for in the first book?
A: The latter. Mo’ Urban Dictionary has a lot of great definitions from urbandictionary.com, some of which were added even before the first book came out. There are a few classics that are printed in both books too, like “jump the couch” and “fo’ shizzle my nizzle.”
Q: How many more volumes can we expect from urbandictionary.com?
A: I haven’t talked with my publisher about that yet — but as long as people are sending new definitions to urbandictionary.com, there’s an opportunity for more volumes of Urban Dictionary the book!
Q: Finally, is there a ceiling to how many words you think the site will eventually include or is slang such a fluid thing that there will always be new additions?
A: As long as we’re still speaking English it’ll continue to change — the only language that doesn’t change is one that’s not spoken anymore! I hope Urban Dictionary can continue to keep up with the pace, and keep documenting how everyday English is spoken.
E-mail Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com
