Who defines slang now? The slow, ironic decline of Urban Dictionary

This isn’t the first time big dictionaries have caught up to 21st-century slang. Last December, the Oxford English Dictionary named “brain rot” its 2024 word of the year. This year, it was “rage bait.” On social media, Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com embrace a humorous, up-to-date approach to the internet’s word of the day, whether it be “demure” or “slop.”

And as Big Dictionary is getting hip, Urban Dictionary has devolved into a “graveyard taken over by the manosphere or general online troglodytes,” said Amanda Montell, a linguist and author of a book about language and gender. The puerile jokes and irreverent snark of the old Urban Dictionary has curdled into a world of vicious, vitriolic vulgarity, racism and sexism.

In the meantime, Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large at Merriam-Webster, points to an explicit term coined by Cory Doctorow, an internet culture expert, to describe a digital platform that becomes gradually worse over time.

“It seems like the textbook case, right?”

A home for ‘Instant Argot’

Slang didn’t always have a formal lexicographical home, said Terry Victor, author of “The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English.” In fact, that was often the very point of slang — that it existed on the margins of society, not in the pages of your grandfather’s dictionary.

In the past, the jargon of a small community was hidden from others, protected as the intimate language of a given subculture. But the intimacy of that shared language blew up with the rise of the internet, Victor said. The language of these once-remote worlds spreading wider and more quickly led to the necessity of a resource like Urban Dictionary, where a person who came across a seemingly boring word like “furry” could discover an entirely new lifestyle and subculture.

Peckham first created Urban Dictionary as a parody of the stuffier, more formal dictionaries of yore. But by the early 2000s, as more and more users uploaded those definitions, people began treating it as a valuable resource. In 2014, The New York Times deemed it a “lexicon for instant argot.” Lawyers around the world cited Urban Dictionary in court, and scholars discussed standardizing its use in academic work.

“It was speed, it was crowdsourcing, it was people paying attention to pop culture,” Jess Zafarris, author of “Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds,” said. “Plenty of song lyrics and community slang hinges on the in crowd’s ability to know what their subcultural colloquialisms mean, and Urban Dictionary was able to document it.”

But Zafarris points to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and the subsequent polarization and intense rhetoric as a turning point for the site. Because Urban Dictionary operated as a crowdsourced platform, anyone could upload a definition, and soon enough, popular words were flooded with competing definitions. People upvoted entries as they saw fit, elevating explanations of all kinds — some accurate, some not, and some blatantly offensive.

“These aren’t helpful anymore,” Zafarris said. “These are people being funny, being satirical and being ugly in many ways, too. The open model enabled speed, but also toxicity.”

Responding to questions over email, Peckham explained that he doesn’t see legacy dictionaries like Merriam-Webster as competing with Urban Dictionary but instead working alongside it. He said he sees Urban Dictionary, which is marking its 26th birthday this month, as a “breaking news” desk, covering “live developments” in language.

“When someone looks up “bussin” in a traditional dictionary, they get a definition,” he wrote. “On Urban Dictionary, they understand how it lives.”

In July 2020, Peckham posted an update to the Urban Dictionary blog, titled “Rethinking the Dictionary.” Peckham invited users to share their thoughts and ideas via a feedback form, and in subsequent posts, he promised to update content guidelines and redevelop the site’s moderation system.

“We know that the real world can be offensive and is full of offensive words,” he wrote in the blog post. “But there is a difference between using Urban Dictionary to document the meaning of an offensive word and using it to celebrate or endorse an offensive meaning.”

Peckham said Urban Dictionary wouldn’t ban certain words, and he wrote that only a small percentage of users were responsible for the abuse. But as faith in Urban Dictionary declined, Zafarris said, legacy dictionaries had sped up.

“I do see a rise and fall,” Sokolowski said. “Trust is what is at issue. There’s something special about dictionary definitions. People expect them to be written by experts. A dictionary is built on trust, and of course I believe that language is the greatest evidence of human consensus that we have.”

Urban Dictionary has listed more than 17 million definitions as of 2025. (Generated using AI)

The world of new slang

Urban Dictionary isn’t dead yet. The platform listed more than 17 million definitions as of 2025. New updates to the site included Urban Dictionary Promote, a flat-fee advertising system, and an experimental artificial intelligence-powered chat feature, no longer in use.

Peckham said the site also revamped its voting system to ensure every upvote and downvote is generated by a human user and not a bot. He said he sees content moderation and “voting authenticity” as twin challenges in the ongoing fight to retain the site’s trustworthiness.

“Making sure that the site reflects actual human opinion, and isn’t manufactured, is critical,” he wrote in an email.

The path for those hardy sorts of words, the survivors with legs, looks different than it did back in 1999, when Urban Dictionary first went online. The path today may include various pit stops along the way, from tiny corners of the internet to going viral on TikTok to the pages of the Times.

“Every word has its own pace,” Sokolowski said.

And the lucky few — “hard pass” and “dad bod” among them — have made it all the way to Merriam-Webster’s 12th edition.

(This article originally appeared in The New York Times.)