In an April 2011 article in The Guardian titled 'In praise of urban dictionaries', Peckham revealed an overview of 10 rules that he had devised for the site's content: 'Publish celebrity names, but reject 'real life' names. Over a 30-day period in March and April 2011, 67,000 people wrote 76,000 new definitions for Urban Dictionary, while 3,500 volunteer editors were registered. The website was later referenced in a 2011 District Court complaint by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents to document the meaning of the vulgarism 'murk', as used in a criminal threat. In July 2009, Peckham explained to The New York Times that Urban Dictionary is not Wikipedia, because it doesn't attempt neutrality: 'Every single word on here is written by someone with a point of view, with a personal experience of the word in the entry.' In April 2009, the site registered 15 million unique visitors, while 80 percent of its monthly users were younger than 25. īy 2009, the site had listed around 4 million entries and received about 2,000 new submissions per day. In 2003, the website gained wider attention after a news article revealed that a judge of the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom had used Urban Dictionary to assist interpreting slang lyrics in a case involving two rappers. He created Urban Dictionary initially as a parody of actual dictionaries, which he thought tended to be 'stuffy' and 'take themselves too seriously'.įor the first five years, the site generated revenue but did not make a profit. He had previously created a spoof version of the Ask Jeeves web search engine while studying at Cal Poly but closed the website after he received an infringement letter. He launched the site to compare urban slang used by university students in different parts of California. The site was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham while he was a freshman computer science major at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. As of 2014, the dictionary contains over seven million definitions, while around 2,000 new entries were being added daily. Words or phrases on Urban Dictionary may have multiple definitions, usage examples, and tags. Originally, Urban Dictionary was intended as a dictionary of slang or cultural words and phrases, not typically found in standard English dictionaries, but it is now used to define any word, event, or phrase (including sexually explicit content). The website was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham. Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced English-language online dictionary for slang words and phrases.

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