And Urban Dictionary is regularly cited as a source in linguistics research, such as a 2015 paper by Natasha Shrikant on Indian American students. Fox Tree uses Urban Dictionary, along with other examples of “public dictionary websites” (like Wikipedia and ), to excavate the uses of like in storytelling. It allows researchers to track terms that are too recent or too niche to appear in establishment dictionaries, and to determine how people are using English online.įor example, one 2006 paper by communication expert Jean E. Whatever we might think of its vulgarity, Urban Dictionary is useful. While Urban Dictionary’s speed may be useful in a legal setting, some lexicologists believe that depending on a crowdsourced dictionary is risky. Urban Dictionary’s definition of to nut, for instance, has been brought up in a sexual harassment claim, and the meanings of jack were debated in a financial restitution case. More serious is the continued tradition of dictionary use in legal cases, where the interpretation of a single word can have grave consequences. Urban Dictionary is being used to determine the acceptability of vanity plate names in some U.S. And according to internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s much-touted new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language: “ IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.” Its pages were saved to the Internet Archive more than 12,500 times between May 25, 2002, and October 4, 2019, with a steady increase over time. Urban Dictionary carries this legacy forward, and the site is likely to persist in some form. By 1785, Francis Grose’s Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue extended the slang lexicon beyond the middle-class conception, adding terms such as bum fodder (for toilet paper). The slang dictionaries of the seventeenth century were considered useful for clueing readers into the language of thieves and cheats, which itself was part of an older tradition of exoticizing the language of the poor and criminal. ![]() ![]() ![]() But it also continues a long history of recording low-brow language: dictionaries of English slang have been around in some form for centuries. With its crowdsourced definitions and high speed of coinage, Urban Dictionary is very much a product of the internet age. They help to add voice to your writing.“IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.” Interjections can really liven up a sentence. Such examples are Wow!, Ouch!, Hurray!, and Oh no!. Interjection - An interjection is a word that shows strong emotion. Homographs - Homographs are words that may or may not sound alike but have the same spelling but a different meaning.Ĭomplex Sentence - A complex sentence is an independent clause joined by one or more dependent clauses. Homophones - Homophones are words that sound alike but they have different meanings and different spellings. Some examples are in, out, under, over, after, out, into, up, down, for, and between. Preposition - A preposition is a word that shows position or, direction. Some examples conjunctions are: and, but, or, nor, although, yet, so, either, and also. It tells what kind, how many, or which one.Ĭonjunction - A conjunction is a word that joins words or word groups together. It may stand for a person, place, thing, or idea.Īdjective - An adjective is a word that describes a noun or pronoun. Proper Noun - The pronoun is a word used in place of one or more nouns. Nouns are the subject of a sentence.Ĭommon Noun - A noun that does not name a specific person, place or thing. Noun - A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. They tell how much, how often, when and where something is done. Verb - A verb is a word that expresses an action or a state of being.Īdverb - An adverb describes how the action is performed.
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