Urban Dictionary

Taking social software thinking out of the academic and into the fun, what do people think about Urban Dictionary? With all this talk about how Wikipedia can be a helpful research tool and an innovative way to incorporate lots of different authors, Urban Dictionary seems like its bastard cousin. Though it claims to be a dictionary of common slang (and it definitely has that), the site has also turned into a warehouse for high schoolers (and younger kids) to post entries about their specific high schools, or even trash specific people (which is really pretty awful).

So Urban Dictionary is quite different from Myspace, Facebook, and certainly online dictionaries in that it allows tiny worlds to be defined. But the definitions are not contingent on a particular person. In a way, our Facebook pages give people an idea of our personalities, our college, and sometimes our hometowns. But it isn’t a forum for actually setting out definitions that can then be voted upon.

Urban Dictionary contains offensive, mean-spirited, and ridiculous entries for words that I doubt anyone uses outside an exclusive group of maybe five people. I know this for sure because my friends and I posted the word “nuvo” two years ago, with a completely made-up definition (though one we use to this day), and now NINETEEN people have voted for it. Which leaves me to wonder if:
A) we started using a word that other people with no knowledge of us use as well
B) my definition was so convincing that people actually believed it was a word
C) people randomly surf the site and vote for definitions...which seems kind of dumb

So…it’s definitely fun. And I think it might have more power in spreading new words then we think.

P.S. you should look up your high school on the site, I bet it’s there, and the entries for high schools are…exciting and often use colorful language