![]() ![]() May also imply promiscuity, but not necessarily. An example of one that, per the guidelines, more or less "document discrimination but not endorse it": "Derogatory term for a (usually younger) female, implying trashiness or tackiness, lower-class status, poor hygiene, flakiness, and a scrawny, pockmarked sort of ugliness. For example, the term " skank" has almost 200 definitions. Because Urban Dictionary's model relies on anonymous internet users to supply and approve content, racism and sexism are rampant. Yet the practical distinction between racial and sexual versus racist and sexist is unclear (as many of the entries I've already cited show). The whole point of Urban Dictionary is we are defining our own language as we speak it." ![]() In 2013, Peckham told the New York Times, " dictionaries may be more heavily researched, but the real authority on language and the meaning comes from people who speak the language. The website was started in 1999 by college freshman Aaron Peckham as a parody of the real dictionary, because, as he told the California Polytechnic State University alumni magazine in 2011, "real dictionaries can be real stuffy and take themselves too seriously." He and his friends initially wrote many of the definitions, and for a while, he kept the web server under his bed. It's so popular, it's been used in court cases-including one in Tennessee in which a court Urban Dictionary's definition of "to nut" as meaning "to ejaculate," thus supporting grounds for a sexual harassment claim-and utilized by the Department of Motor Vehicles and by the US Patent and Trademark Office to look up the meanings of various slang terms. According to the Web analytics company Quantcast, it's currently the 31st most-visited site in the country, and last month garnered nearly 130 million page views. Virulent racism and sexism are common on the web, but Urban Dictionary is both intended as a resource and one of the most popular websites online. Read more: The Power of 'Petty': How One Small Word Came to Represent Black Resistance
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