Every definition on Urban Dictionary was written by a user like you. About a thousand definitions are sent to Urban Dictionary every day, but only half enter the
hallowed ranks beside ratchet,
Harlem Shake, and Cleveland Steamer. People often email and ask, why didn’t my definition get published? Well, we’d like to know too.
The truth is, we don’t decide. Sometimes we’re just as
puzzled. Some rejected definitions seem perfectly good to us. Sometimes we wouldn’t vote for a definition, but we can’t really say why. Urban Dictionary’s users get to edit the content, so they get to decide. However, since this is a frequent question, we thought we’d look into how users make
the decision to publish or not publish a particular definition.
We wanted to understand what matters in a definition, what helps it get accepted. To do this, we started by asking users to just describe a list of eight random submissions. We gave people one line of text to describe the submission. For example, one of the words was “
phil collins.”
Not Published
People described this definition as “Somewhat biased”, “opinionated”, or “NO!
PHIL COLLINS IS THE SHIT”. We collected 69 responses for each word, grouped them together and tried to find the main idea in the description. We continued to group things together until we ended up with eight categories.
funny
hilarious
pun/play on words
amusing
clever/smart
clearly and correctly written
complicated/too long
bad grammar
capitalized/
formatting
confused
specificity
personal
too specific
about a celebrity
slander
biased
opinionated
offensive
degrading
slander
sexist
racist
usage
redundant
original
makes sense
helpful
lame
strange
weird
quality of the definition
informative
true
wrong
accurate
stupid/dumb
graphic
disgusting
visceral
dirty
provocative
sexual
improper