Nguyen and co begin by analyzing the Urban Dictionary content in the broadest terms.

It also guides users as to what constitutes a definition. Moderators edit the content, control vandalism, and aim to generate high-quality results. Unsurprisingly, Wiktionary has also become an important online resource, one that researchers increasingly use for natural-language processing and so on. It records only word definitions and employs guidelines about how these should be compiled. This is a sister site to Wikipedia, run by the same Wikimedia organization. Wiktionary is an interesting comparison because it takes a much more formal approach to crowdsourcing. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of Urban Dictionary at this scale,” they say. Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Dong Nguyen at the Alan Turing Institute in London and a few pals, who compare the Urban Dictionary and its content with Wiktionary, another crowdsourced dictionary. So just how good is the Urban Dictionary at capturing new words, and how does it compare with more conventional approaches to producing online dictionaries? Also, little is known about the people who post new words and whether the entries reflect real changes in the language or just those that affect a small subset of people. In the absence of style guides, editors, and moderators, the content can be vague and inaccurate. Of course, Urban Dictionary has its shortcomings. Upvotes slightly outnumber downvotes on the Urban Dictionary. Today, many millions of users rely on the site to keep them up to date with slang, common usage, and popular culture.

A voting system allows users to show admiration or disdain, revealing words’ popularity.

It captures new words quickly and registers many of the variations that emerge over time. It even allows opinions, which can sometimes be offensive. Part of Urban Dictionary’s appeal is its informal approach, which allows both definitions and descriptions of words. famously used the site in 2005 to help them understand slang used by two rappers involved in a dispute. It began life in 1999 as a parody of but has since become an important resource on the Web. The Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced website that records new words and their meanings.

Modern dictionary of slang