Urban Dictionary
 |
|
.png)
Screenshot of Urban Dictionary front page as of 2011
|
|
| Owner | Aaron Peckham |
|---|---|
| Created by | Aaron Peckham |
| Slogan(s) | Define Your World |
| Website | urbandictionary |
| Alexa rank |
 593 (July 2016[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Launched | 1999 |
| Current status | Active |
Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced online dictionary of slang words and phrases that was founded in 1999 as a parody of Dictionary.com and Vocabulary.com by then-college freshman Aaron Peckham. Some of the definitions on the website can be found as early as 1999, however most early definitions are from 2003. At the start of 2014, the dictionary featured over seven million definitions, while 2,000 new daily entries were being added. In November 2014, the Advertise page of the website states that, on a monthly basis, Urban Dictionary averages 72 million impressions and 18 million unique readers. Anyone with either a Facebook or Gmail account can make a submission to the dictionary, and it is claimed that all entries are reviewed by several volunteers. Site visitors may agree or disagree with definitions by an up/down vote system.
The site was founded in 1999 by Peckham while he was a freshman computer science major at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly). Peckham had previously created a version of the Ask Jeeves web search engine while studying at Cal Poly but closed the website after he received an infringement letter.
During the "Internet Underground" panel of the 2011 ROFLCon Summit, Peckham explained that, as a computer science student, his primary motivation was to construct a website; but he was also dissatisfied with the conventional English-language dictionary, as it "was telling us how English was spoken, instead of reflecting how English was actually spoken." For the launch of Urban Dictionary, Peckham installed the website on a FileMaker Pro web server that was operated from under his dormitory room bed at Cal Poly. One of the first definitions on the site was "", defined as "a retired gangster who sits on the porch in the ghetto and preaches to the youngsters".
...
Wikipedia