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. A “pornocchio” is someone who exaggerates his sexual experience post this “definition” and you’re one up on the world’s pornocchios. These neologisms serve to crystallize and critique entire experiences or social subsystems. 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”). 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. An entry is often likely to be an ad-hoc neologism, invented just for this dictionary.

Clunkers swiftly fall to the bottom.īut this community policing doesn’t mean that Urban Dictionary contains only actual words.

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. 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.īetter, then, to accept at the outset that Urban Dictionary is not a lexicographical project at all. In a typical month, 80 percent of its users are younger than 25. The site had 15 million unique visitors in April. 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. That’s a lot of service from this exquisite and unorthodox resource, and it’s not atypical. 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. Maybe the dictionary would also give my childhood’s unprintable but banal barnyard slang for the same boots. ”)Īt 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. (The usage example put to rest my query: “Man when we was runnin from the cops my timbos felt like air nikes on me. 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.

Urban dictionary word of the day