Emo, Love, and God: Making Sense of Urban Dictionary, a Crowd-Sourced Online Dictionary
Table 3: Headword comparison between UD and Wiktionary. The table reports the unique number of headwords in each category. Only UD headwords with at least two entries are included.
['Overlap', '[BOLD] No processing 50,522', '[BOLD] No processing (6%)', '[BOLD] All lowercase 56,730', '[BOLD] All lowercase (7%)', '[BOLD] Mixed 55,003', '[BOLD] Mixed (7%)']
In this way, we use the number of entries as a crude proxy for whether the headword is of interest to a wider group of people. Note that this filtering is not applied to Wiktionary, because each headword has only one page and headwords that do not match Wiktionary guidelines are already removed by the community. Compared to the first analysis, the difference is striking. In this comparison, the number of unique headwords in Wiktionary is higher than that of UD. From a manual inspection we see that many Wiktionary-specific headwords include domain specific and encyclopaedic words (e.g., acacetins, dramaturge and shakespearean sonnets), archaic words (e.g., unaffrighted), as well as some commonly used words (e.g., deceptive, e-voucher). We also find that many of the popular UD headwords (i.e., headwords that have many entries) that are not covered in Wiktionary are proper nouns: The top five entries are canada’s history, justin bieber, george w. bush, runescape and green day. In some cases, entries uniquely appearing in UD refer to words with genuine general coverage, such as loml (in total 11 entries) defined as, e.g., ‘Acronym of "Love of My Life"’ or broham ‘a close buddy, compadre, smoking and/drinking buddy. a term of endearment between men to reaffirm heterosexuality.’ (in total 18 entries).