As unusual and as unlikely as this may sound, American courts have been referring to an online dictionary to help solve some sentencing complications arising from the use of urban language.

The Urban Dictionary is an online platform which collates slang words gathered by crowdsourcing. With no hard and fast rules, people submit new words to the website and these are either accepted or rejected in the online dictionary by way of votes from the other site users. Whilst many of these words are barely used and indeed may just have been submitted for fun, others have become more commonplace in our language, but the meanings are not necessarily clear cut. For instance, the word ‘emo’ has over 1,100 definitions which have all been submitted by contributors to the website and are ranked in popularity by the number of votes they receive. The Urban Dictionary was created by a college student, Aaron Peckham, in 1999 and grew in size as the popularity of the Internet grew, so that now the website receives 110 million monthly page views.

So How Does the Court Use the Urban Dictionary?

In some court cases, the definitions of slang words used in disputes are unclear, and the online dictionary is consulted to clarify the meaning in order to settle a case. For example, ‘catfishing’ relates to Internet predators and ‘iron’ means a handgun. A recent restitution case in Wisconsin which involved a convicted robber’s plea to overturn his sentence was dismissed when consulting the Urban Dictionary showed the word ‘jack’ (relating to the robber’s group’s reference to themselves as ‘the jack boys’) to mean ‘steal’. As crowdsourcing platforms such as the Urban Dictionary are increasing in popularity, so too is the way that referencing is carried out for important matters such as court cases. Who wouldn’t want to refer to a free online dictionary for an instant answer instead of paying a lot of money to a research company and having to wait for the result?

What slang words have you learned recently and how does their meaning differ to the normal definition?