Tech

Here Is What the Urban Dictionary Looks Like on Google Images

By Austin Considine

Earlier this year London-based artist Ben West designed a Google Images dictionary titled, simply, "Google". The idea behind the 1,200-plus-page book was simple: Design some software to select and save the first Google Images result for every single word in the Oxford English Dictionary, then print it in a big, beautiful book.

The results range from the banal to the insightful, the anodyne to the outrageous. Because, as we all know, Google Images can be extremely helpful (especially for bloggers who need to steal other people’s work to illustrate their stories), but not always. Sometimes the results are as worthless as online image copyright.

But you know what’s way more fun than the stuffy ol’ OED? The Urban Dictionary. Motherboard thought it might be fun to put together a micro-version of West’s book by selecting the first Google Images result for one Urban Dictionary term per letter of the alphabet.* Along with that image, we’ve included Urban Dictionary’s top definition – a.k.a., the one that got the most votes. Sometimes there was complete disunity between text and image (e.g. “gasoc”), but sometimes that disunity was funny (see “kibbles and bits”). I would like to think that, in some ways, it presents an even more accurate snapshot of today’s ever enweirdening culture than West’s book does.

And in that spirit, I just made up the word enweirdening (verb infinitive: “to enweirden,” i.e., to make weirder). Let’s see if it sticks.

Aluminum Digger

Image by DonteGalloway

A term coined by GloZell from Youtube (glozell1), meaning a younger girl who is too young to be a gold digger (a woman who preys on men for their money), and has yet to move up the metal scheme.

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com.