The first time I used Urban Dictionary, the online open-source dictionary of slang, I was looking for “timbos.” I thought I knew what the word meant — Timberland boots — but I hoped to discover whether timbos were still part of hip-hop style or had reverted back to being the farmwear I’d known as a kid. (The usage example put to rest my query: “Man when we was runnin from the cops my timbos felt like air nikes on me.”)
At the time, my larger question was whether timbos, or anything else, could ever go back to the farm once they were anointed in song by the Wu-Tang Clan. Maybe the dictionary would also give my childhood’s unprintable but banal barnyard slang for the same boots. It didn’t. I found a related entry that defined “tools” as people who wear Timberlands stylelessly and “think that they are ghetto when they are actually quite white.” After only a few minutes and some minimal triangulation of entries, I felt pretty confident about where the boots stood between farm and ghetto, the ’80s and the ’00s, tool and cool.
That’s a lot of service from this exquisite and unorthodox resource, and it’s not atypical. With more than four million definitions submitted so far, and 2,000 more coming in every day, Urban Dictionary is a stunningly useful document that unlike most media is made and used by actual young people — in droves. The site had 15 million unique visitors in April. In a typical month, 80 percent of its users are younger than 25. The population with the biggest ego stake in slang — divining it, protecting it, practicing it, spreading it, declaring it over — actually creates and patrols the content.
Almost perversely, Urban Dictionary avoids most of the standard dictionary apparatus. You won’t find information about parts of speech, etymologies or even standard spellings in it. Its sensibility, in fact, borders on the illiterate, which must be a first for a dictionary. It’s also packed with redundancies and made-up entries. This chaos seems to please Aaron Peckham, the company’s founder and chief executive. “Wikipedia strives for its N.P.O.V. — its neutral point of view,” he told me by phone. “We’re the opposite of that. Every single word on here is written by someone with a point of view, with a personal experience of the word in the entry.”
Better, then, to accept at the outset that Urban Dictionary is not a lexicographical project at all. Its wheelhouse is sociolinguistics. It’s a quick way for 9-year-olds to learn without embarrassment what “T&A” is and an equally discreet way for boomers to study the nuances of “booty.” A ranking system means that the best definitions make it to the top of the list. Clunkers swiftly fall to the bottom.
But this community policing doesn’t mean that Urban Dictionary contains only actual words. Far from it. An entry is often likely to be an ad-hoc neologism, invented just for this dictionary. Many contributors, then, aren’t defining pre-existing terms but rather suggesting communities in which impressive, funny or complex experiences are so common that they demand a shorthand to designate them. Language groups whose arcane customs are hinted at in Urban Dictionary include corporate travelers (“ghetto upgrade”), pinball fans (“going multiball”), social networkers (“inbox rot”), dinner-party hosts (“buffer guest”), beer drinkers (“déjà brew”), laid-off workers (“canniversary”) and observant socializers (“you wastin my minutes”).
These neologisms serve to crystallize and critique entire experiences or social subsystems. A “pornocchio” is someone who exaggerates his sexual experience; post this “definition” and you’re one up on the world’s pornocchios. A “manicorn” is the mythic female-friendly hero of romantic comedies like “Say Anything.” Coining the word doubles as ribbing the genre and debunking the fantasy.
Peckham started Urban Dictionary in 1999 when he was a freshman at California Polytechnic State University. Among the first definitions on the site was “the man,” which the site now defines this way: “The man is the head of ‘the establishment’ put in place to ‘bring us down.’ ” Urban Dictionary has chugged along through Web booms and busts. As an online linguistic resource, it now rivals the supremely self-conscious Wikipedia. And though Urban Dictionary is widely considered the best place to privately educate yourself about indelicate pop phenomena, it also has no trouble attracting ads, including ubiquitous Google links to sites like Timberland.com.
The home page has a backward-running catalog of the site’s Word of the Day, which Peckham chooses himself. Most evoke social scenes through inside jokes. Or not so inside; not anymore. The dictionary has cleverly incentivized subcultures to show their hands and publish their snickers and asides.
Why would so many kids want to give up their jargon? Maybe they’re chasing a “neologasm,” which was the Word of the Day on Jan. 14: “the pleasurable feeling from having coined a new word.”
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