In July 2009, Peckham explained to The New York Times that Urban Dictionary is not Wikipedia, because it doesn't attempt neutrality: "Every single word on here is written by someone with a point of view, with a personal experience of the word in the entry." In April 2009, the site registered 15 million unique visitors, while 80 percent of its monthly users were younger than 25. īy 2009, the site had listed around 4 million entries and received about 2,000 new submissions per day. In 2003, the website gained wider attention after a news article revealed that a judge of the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom had used Urban Dictionary to assist interpreting slang lyrics in a case involving two rappers.
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He created Urban Dictionary initially as a parody of actual dictionaries, which he thought tended to be "stuffy" and "take themselves too seriously".įor the first five years, the site generated revenue but did not make a profit. He had previously created a spoof version of the Ask Jeeves web search engine while studying at Cal Poly but closed the website after he received an infringement letter. He launched the site to compare urban slang used by university students in different parts of California. The site was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham while he was a freshman computer science major at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.