First it was bra colors. Then it was doppelgangers. Now name definitions through Urban Dictionary. As Urban Dictionary explains through its Facebook fan page, in order to participate, go to urbandictionary.com, type in your first name, copy and paste this as your status, and put the first entry for your name under comments. ”Bridget,” for example, produces: An amazingly happy, yet clumsy person, who is so nice and is always helpful to cheer up everyone else.
Urban Dictionary is a web-based, user defined dictionary of slang words and phrases. The site contains over four million definitions, submissions are regulated by volunteer editors and rated by site visitors. Quality is controlled democratically at two levels – first a definition must receive a sufficient number of “accept” votes from registered users to appear in the dictionary, then it can be voted up or down by site visitors. Definitions appear in descending order depending on the number of votes they receive.
Urban Dictionary was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham while he was a freshman computer science major at Cal-Poly University. The first definition on the site was, “the man,” referring to, “the head of the establishment put in place to ‘bring us down.’”
The site receives approximately 15 million unique visitors per month, with 80% of users being younger than 25. Now that they have their very own week on Facebook, that number is sure to grow.
