(Later, as black culture became the principal vortex for which popular culture mined cool, intra-communal expressions like bae, on fleek, and turnt, were increasingly the property of the wider public.) It was a place where entry into the arena did not require language to adhere to the rules of proper grammar. The site, it then seemed, was an oasis for all varieties of slang, text speak, and cultural idioms. That they were afforded a kind of linguistic reverence was what awed me, what drew me in. Before Urban Dictionary, I'd never seen words like hella or jawn defined anywhere other than in conversation. Here was a place where words and phrases that friends, cousins, neighbors, and people I knew used with regularity found resonance and meaning. My understanding of it hewed to a simple logic. now stop bitching and get back to the kitchen." Under Lady Gaga, one top entry describes her as the embodiment of "a very bad joke played on all of us by Tim Burton." For LeBron James, it reads: "To bail out on your team when times get tough." In fact, one of the site's definitions for sexism details it as "a way of life like welfare for black people. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism currently serve as the basis for some of the most popular definitions on the site. By allowing anyone to post definitions (users can up or down vote their favorite ones) Peckham opened the door for the most insidious among us. It transformed into a harbor for hate speech. In time, however, the site began to espouse the worst of the internet-Urban Dictionary became something much uglier than perhaps what Peckham set out to create. Under Lady Gaga, one top entry describes her as "a very bad joke played on all of us by Tim Burton." For LeBron James, it reads: "To bail out on your team when times get tough." his eyeliner could literally kill a man") even my name, Jason, has an insane 337 definitions (my favorite one, which I can attest is 1,000 percent true: "the absolute greatest person alive").
You can find definitions for just about anything or anyone: from popular phrases like Hot Girl Summer ("a term used to define girls being unapologetically themselves, having fun, loving yourself, and doing YOU") and In my bag ("the act of being in your own world focused being in the zone on your grind") to musicians like Pete Wentz ("an emo legend. Today, Urban Dictionary averages around 65 million visitors a month, according to data from SimilarWeb, with almost 100 percent of its traffic originating via organic search. In interviews, Peckham has said the site began as a joke, as a way to mock, but it didn't take long before it ballooned into a thriving corpus. Founded by Aaron Peckham in 1999-then a computer science major at Cal Poly-the site became notorious for allowing what sanctioned linguistic gatekeepers, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, would not: a plurality of voice. Urban Dictionary, now in its 20th year, is a digital repository that contains more than 8 million definitions and famously houses all manner of slang and cultural expressions.
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