Urban Dictionary: New slang and more

Are you familiar with these abbreviations: "lolz", "rofl", "lmao"? Well if you aren't, then maybe you should check out www.urbandictionary.com and see for yourself what they mean.

But first of all let me relieve your curiosity (please pardon me for the expletives that follow). "lolz" stands for "laughing out loud, zebra", "rofl" stands for "rolling on floor laughing" and "lmao" stands for "laughing my arse off". These abbreviations are used to express amusement and are commonly used in chat rooms and generally in cyberspace.

If you want to find out more about Internet lingo, I suggest you check out Urban Dictionary, a website that provides a free dictionary service with a twist: Anyone can add a new word. The website's motto reads, "Urban Dictionary is the dictionary you wrote. Define your world". As of April 3, when I wrote this article, the online dictionary had 4,855,580 entries, an astronomical number considering the site was only launched in December 1999. The number is expected to increase as users continue to submit new entries on a daily basis.

If you are a trend-spotting person, this website will come in handy. You can browse words, phrases, acronyms or abbreviations from A-Z. And you can follow the dictionary on twitter at @urbandaily or twitter.com/urbandaily to get daily new-word updates on your twitter account. You can also subscribe to this service via email.

Every day the website highlights a word added by a user. The word of the day on March 27, 2010 was "understandment", added by Audrey N. on Oct. 29, 2007, which is a combination of understanding and agreement.

This word is particularly apt when talking about informal commitments. On March 31, 2010, Urban Dictionary highlighted "directionally challenged", submitted by Joy Rising. It is used to describe someone who does not know their left from right, who has a bad sense of direction and relies on navigational aids or who is bad at reading maps or taking spoken directions. The submitter also suggests the word can be used with hyphen if necessary. The constituent words are of course defined on normal dictionary sites, such as Merriam-Webster or Oxford, but only Urban Dictionary can make sense of such combinations.

The beauty of this web-dictionary is that you can come up with any word that you like, words that come to your mind that don't mean anything, or you can create your own definition of a word, even one that contradicts the standard definition.

If users like it, they will give you a thumbs-up, but if they dislike it they will give you a thumbs-down. Who knows, maybe people will start using your word in real-life conversation or when they blogging?

That may sound neat, but the 11-year-old website is not without its downsides. You may find some of the words or definitions offensive. The definitions may also confuse you because users can add any definition to a word they see fit.

To make matters worse, just about anyone who registers can act as an editor, which means that they can decide whether a word is good enough for public use or not. Of course to do this they must adhere to some guidelines set by the website administrator.

But Urban Dictionary is not merely about words, it also sells a variety of merchandise such as mugs, fridge magnets, stickers, mouse pads, sweatshirts, hats and T-shirts that can be customized with any definition on Urban Dictionary. A fridge magnet or a mouse pad will cost you US$5 and a sweatshirt $50. To view the merchandise, you only need to log on to the Urban Dictionary website and click on the "store" tab, or for a wider selection of T-shirts, you can visit www.bustedtees.com, which supplies T-shirts for Urban Dictionary.

You should not judge a book by its cover, so don't judge this website before checking it out yourself, yaknahmsayin (do you know what I'm saying?) - as some users of Urban Dictionary say. Give it a try, it won't hurt, and if you are still struggling with your English and fearful that this website will compromise your skills, fear not - it might just help you with your social English, i.e. teach you how to speak a language only the hip and cool can understand.

Source : The Jakarta Post