Time
again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative
online destinations. Our web guide is VOA's Art Chimes.
This
week, it's a resource for people who want to know more about the English
language in all its contemporary messiness - a great place to learn about the
words you won't find in most regular dictionaries.
"Urban
Dictionary is a slang dictionary with definitions written by people who come to
visit the site. So all of its content is written by normal people like you and
me," says Aaron Peckham. He is the founder of UrbanDictionary.com, a site he created as a university student.
Anyone
can submit a new word, or a new definition for a word already in the
dictionary. More than three million definitions have been submitted in the
decade or so that Urban Dictionary has been on line. Peckham and his team of
editors update the site daily, adding about 1,000 new entries every day.
The
result is an English lexicon that is fun, engaging and up-to-date, if not
exactly scholarly. It is, we should warn you, full of words you can't say on
the radio. But of course, those might just be the words you need to know about.
"People
have written in to me to tell me that they use Urban Dictionary to figure out
what their kids are talking about, what their students are talking about, to
figure out what people are talking about at the MTV music awards, what's going
on in lyrics and stuff. Even what politicians say sometimes can be decoded with
Urban Dictionary.com."
Because
it's written by ordinary, mostly young users, not stuffy old editors of
mainstream lexicons, UrbanDictionary.com is a window on not just the English
language but on contemporary culture.
"I
hope Urban Dictionary is a way to figure out what's going on in American
culture," Peckham says.
"Some
people have told me that after arriving in the United States that Urban
Dictionary's been a really valuable resource to figure out what people are
really saying because there's so much meaning behind words besides what's in
the normal dictionary definition. And Urban Dictionary can help to decode
that."
...
Especially since every definition includes an example of contemporary usage at
UrbanDictionary.com, or get the link to this and more than 200 other
Websites of the Week from
our site, voanews.com.