The internet has made dictionaries more accessible to all
globally. However, the online dictionaries clearly vary in credibility. Rather
than classifying them merely as credible versus doubtful, highbrow and lowbrow,
it might be better to place them on a fluid spectrum, with Urban Dictionary, one
of the crowd-sourced ones, being apparently the least edited (if not completely
unedited), at the bottom of the heap. This dictionary seems to use “moderators”
who vote on whether to include a suggested entry, rather than availing itself
of lexicographers or proper editors. The moderators do not correct spelling,
grammar, or wording. In an article entitled “How
Linguists Are Using Urban Dictionary”, Christine Ro of JSTOR Daily has in
fact described Urban Dictionary as “a linguistic sewer” since it allows
audacious contributors to coin and add terms in a way one would not normally do
in a formal context. The writer states that “Urban Dictionary continues a long
history of recording low-brow language. It’s also a repository of a specific
kind of internet immaturity.” It seems that anyone can add to it, with little
resistance or quality control, unlike other crowd-sourced dictionaries such as
Wiktionary, which employs lexicographers. Urban Dictionary’s style is somewhat
vulgar in places, with new expressions, and new senses to existing expressions,
constantly being coined. Grammar errors abound. Though Urban Dictionary was
started by a Computer Science student in 1999 to parody Dictionary.com, it has
grown to attract tens of millions of visitors per month according to Ro. Would one
recommend Urban Dictionary to most students? Not really, though they should
know that it exists. Exceptions as to whom it may concern would be, for
example, students of linguistics.
Slang dictionaries are not new to the English language, having
for centuries clued readers on the language of marginalized people such as
criminals. Still, Urban Dictionary appears to be an extreme case, prompting language
purists to consider the site as a major source of corruption of the English
language, with a “bias toward obnoxiousness” as Ro put it. In fact, the writer
wonders whether the contributors are not “just pranking would-be scholars”
using the site for entertainment. In the end she admits that linguists are carefully
studying Urban Dictionary to “track, date, and analyze” language regardless of
how vulgar or audience-specific it may be. She cites internet linguist Gretchen
McCulloch’s 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.” Trash in, trash out! That was around a decade ago.
More recently, researchers have capitalized on the sarcasm of the dictionary for
training AI in sarcasm detection, as cited by Wilson et. al. in “Urban
Dictionary Embeddings for Slang NLP Applications.”
Urban Dictionary’s blog provides updates on how the
dictionary is evolving. For example, the moderators can no longer accept
entries simply because they like them; their job is to check them against a set
of guidelines that were introduced in 2021. The guidelines encourage linguistic
creativity but clarify that while offensive entries are allowed (because they
exist in society), such entries must not target individuals or encourage
harassment, discrimination, or violence against others. The dictionary had been
criticized in the past for allowing racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism.
For instance, Jason Parham, writing for Wired magazine in 2019 had commented
that “The crowdsourced dictionary once felt like a pioneering tool of the early
internet era. Now in its 20th year, it has become something much more
inhospitable.”
Studying this form of slang is one thing, but using it would
be a different ball game altogether.
