A new trend is sweeping social media and people can’t get enough of it. Right now, people are heading to the popular community-written encyclopedia Urban Dictionary and looking up their names, often with hilarious results.
What is Urban Dictionary?
Since it was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham, Urban Dictionary has allowed users to catalog and chronicle popular slang terms and their definitions. Currently, over 2000 different definitions are added to it daily, and the site is said to hold over seven million definitions. These cover all slang, from the extremely popular to the immensely obscure.
Due to its crowd-sourced nature, people can add any local or even personal slang they come across, leading to many words having lots of highly obscure and rarely used definitions. However, what Urban Dictionary is most known for is its adult-word definitions, and thus readers who are easily offended may wish to skip this trend, lest they end up looking at their name in a much different light.
Where did the Urban Dictionary trend start?
The trend appears to have been started by Instagram user bymayuuu, who made a post using Instagram’s brand new “Add Yours” sticker feature. This sticker asked readers to “Show us ur name in Urban Dictionary 🤥⭐️” and people quickly responded, and over 2.9 million users have responded to the sticker on Instagram and many people have been sharing it on their stories.
This trend spilled over to Twitter, with more internet citizens taking screenshots and posting their names, and Urban Dictionary has been trending on Twitter all day because of it.
How do you take part in the Urban Dictionary trend?
Taking part in the trend is easy. You simply head to the Urban Dictionary and enter your name in the search bar. Then see what your name means, according to the dictionary’s many users.
For instance, when I inputted my name into the search, I found that, according to Urban Dictionary, my name means:
“An amazing guy, who is funny and social. he deserves the best in life and deserves to be with an amazing girl. he knows exactly how to make people laugh and isn’t so bad to look at either. actually, he’s absolutely sexy and good lookin. anyone that is lucky enough to have him in their life should truly keep him there.”
However, not all users are as lucky as me (and other Jonathons), and some users have learned that their name has a very unexpected meaning.
Others are posting celebrity names. And finding out that the internet, while often divided, can agree about a few things.
Even Netflix India jumped on the trend, using a Breaking Bad image to perfectly summarize the situation.
Of course, some are publicly wondering where this trend came from. While the Urban Dictionary is still a popular website, in the eyes of many, it’s still a web trend heavily associated with an earlier era. As one person put it, “Why are people posting their name’s Urban Dictionary definitions — did I wake up in 2011?”
However, one user responded to that with a rather compelling theory for why it is has caught on this week: “We are bored and with our parents again for the week. So, yes, it’s 2011 again.”
See what your name means now on Urban Dictionary.