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Slang for change.

As you've probably noticed, the slang synonyms for " change " are listed above. Note that due to the nature of the algorithm, some results returned by your query may only be concepts, ideas or words that are related to " change " (perhaps tenuously). This is simply due to the way the search algorithm works.

You might also have noticed that many of the synonyms or related slang words are racist/sexist/offensive/downright appalling - that's mostly thanks to the lovely community over at Urban Dictionary (not affiliated with Urban Thesaurus). Urban Thesaurus crawls the web and collects millions of different slang terms, many of which come from UD and turn out to be really terrible and insensitive (this is the nature of urban slang, I suppose). Hopefully the related words and synonyms for " change " are a little tamer than average.

The Urban Thesaurus was created by indexing millions of different slang terms which are defined on sites like Urban Dictionary . These indexes are then used to find usage correlations between slang terms. The official Urban Dictionary API is used to show the hover-definitions. Note that this thesaurus is not in any way affiliated with Urban Dictionary.

Due to the way the algorithm works, the thesaurus gives you mostly related slang words, rather than exact synonyms. The higher the terms are in the list, the more likely that they're relevant to the word or phrase that you searched for. The search algorithm handles phrases and strings of words quite well, so for example if you want words that are related to lol and rofl you can type in lol rofl and it should give you a pile of related slang terms. Or you might try boyfriend or girlfriend to get words that can mean either one of these (e.g. bae ). Please also note that due to the nature of the internet (and especially UD), there will often be many terrible and offensive terms in the results.

There is still lots of work to be done to get this slang thesaurus to give consistently good results, but I think it's at the stage where it could be useful to people, which is why I released it.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: @krisk , @HubSpot , and @mongodb .

Finally, you might like to check out the growing collection of curated slang words for different topics over at Slangpedia .

Please note that Urban Thesaurus uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy .

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Jason Parham

What Happened to Urban Dictionary?

On January 24, 2017, a user by the name of d0ughb0y uploaded a definition to Urban Dictionary, the popular online lexicon that relies on crowdsourced definitions. Under Donald Trump —who, four days prior, was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, prompting multiple Women's Marches a day later—he wrote: "The man who got more obese women out to walk on his first day in office than Michelle Obama did in eight years." Since being uploaded, it has received 25,716 upvotes and is considered the top definition for Donald Trump. It is followed by descriptions that include: "He doesn't like China because they actually have a great wall"; "A Cheeto… a legit Cheeto"; and "What all hispanics refer to as 'el diablo.'" In total, there are 582 definitions for Donald Trump—some hilarious, others so packed with bias you wonder if the president himself actually wrote them, yet none of them are entirely accurate.

Urban Dictionary, now in its 20th year, is a digital repository that contains more than 8 million definitions and famously houses all manner of slang and cultural expressions. Founded by Aaron Peckham in 1999—then a computer science major at Cal Poly—the site became notorious for allowing what sanctioned linguistic gatekeepers, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, would not: a plurality of voice. In interviews , Peckham has said the site began as a joke, as a way to mock Dictionary.com, but it didn't take long before it ballooned into a thriving corpus.

Today, Urban Dictionary averages around 65 million visitors a month, according to data from SimilarWeb , with almost 100 percent of its traffic originating via organic search. You can find definitions for just about anything or anyone: from popular phrases like Hot Girl Summer ("a term used to define girls being unapologetically themselves, having fun, loving yourself, and doing YOU") and In my bag ("the act of being in your own world; focused; being in the zone; on your grind") to musicians like Pete Wentz ("an emo legend. his eyeliner could literally kill a man"); even my name, Jason , has an insane 337 definitions (my favorite one, which I can attest is 1,000 percent true: "the absolute greatest person alive").

In the beginning, Peckham's project was intended as a corrective. He wanted, in part, to help map the vastness of the human lexicon, in all its slippery, subjective glory (a message on the homepage of the site reads: "Urban Dictionary Is Written By You"). Back then, the most exciting, and sometimes most culture-defining, slang was being coined constantly, in real time. What was needed was an official archive for those evolving styles of communication. "A printed dictionary, which is updated rarely," Peckham said in 2014 , "tells you what thoughts are OK to have, what words are OK to say." That sort of one-sided authority did not sit well with him. So he developed a version that ascribed to a less exclusionary tone: local and popular slang, or what linguist Gretchen McCulloch might refer to as "public, informal, unselfconscious language" now had a proper home.

In time, however, the site began to espouse the worst of the internet—Urban Dictionary became something much uglier than perhaps what Peckham set out to create. It transformed into a harbor for hate speech. By allowing anyone to post definitions (users can up or down vote their favorite ones) Peckham opened the door for the most insidious among us. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and sexism currently serve as the basis for some of the most popular definitions on the site. In fact, one of the site's definitions for sexism details it as "a way of life like welfare for black people. now stop bitching and get back to the kitchen." Under Lady Gaga, one top entry describes her as the embodiment of "a very bad joke played on all of us by Tim Burton." For LeBron James , it reads: "To bail out on your team when times get tough."

When I first discovered Urban Dictionary around 2004, I considered it a public good. The internet still carried an air of innocence then; the lion's share of people who roamed chat forums and posted on LiveJournal had yet to adopt the mob instincts of cancel culture ; Twitter was years away from warping our consumption habits and Facebook was only a fraction of the giant it is today. I was relatively new to what the internet could offer—its infinite landscapes dazzled my curious teenage mind—and found a strange solace in Urban Dictionary.

My understanding of it hewed to a simple logic. Here was a place where words and phrases that friends, cousins, neighbors, and people I knew used with regularity found resonance and meaning. Before Urban Dictionary, I'd never seen words like hella or jawn defined anywhere other than in conversation. That they were afforded a kind of linguistic reverence was what awed me, what drew me in. The site, it then seemed, was an oasis for all varieties of slang, text speak, and cultural idioms. (Later, as black culture became the principal vortex for which popular culture mined cool, intra-communal expressions like bae , on fleek , and turnt , were increasingly the property of the wider public.) It was a place where entry into the arena did not require language to adhere to the rules of proper grammar. As Mary B. Zeigler and Viktor Osinubi proposed in “Theorizing the Postcoloniality of African American English,” , it is the “cultural elite and their allies who help enforce acceptable codes of linguistic conduct,” which unfairly leverages social customs.

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Urban Dictionary's abandonment of that edict afforded it a rebel spirit. Early on, the beauty of the site was its deep insistence on showing how slang is socialized based on a range of factors: community, school, work. How we casually convey meaning is a direct reflection of our geography, our networks, our worldviews. At its best, Urban Dictionary crystallized that proficiency. Slang is often understood as a less serious form of literacy, as deficient or lacking. Urban Dictionary said otherwise. It let the cultivators of the most forward-looking expressions of language speak for themselves. It believed in the splendor of slang that was deemed unceremonious and paltry.

In her new book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language , McCulloch puts forward a question: "But what kind of net can you use to capture living language?" She tells the story of German dialectologist Georg Wenker, who mailed postal surveys to teachers and asked them to translate sentences. French linguist Jules Gilliéron later innovated on Wenker's method: He sent a trained worker into the field to oversee the surveys. This practice was known as dialect mapping. The hope was to identify the rich, varied characteristics of a given language: be it speech patterns, specific terminology, or the lifespan of shared vocabulary. For a time, field studies went on like this. Similar to Wikipedia and Genius, Urban Dictionary inverted that approach through crowdsourcing: the people came to it.

"In the early years of Urban Dictionary we tried to keep certain words out," Peckham once said . "But it was impossible—authors would re-upload definitions, or upload definitions with alternate spellings. Today, I don't think it's the right thing to try to remove offensive words." (Peckham didn't respond to emails seeking comment for this story.) One regular defense he lobbed at critics was that the site, and its cornucopia of definitions, was not meant to be taken at face value. Its goodness and its nastiness, instead, were a snapshot of a collective outlook. If anything, Peckham said, Urban Dictionary tapped into the pulse of our thinking.

But if the radiant array of terminology uploaded to the site was initially meant to function as a possibility of human speech, it is now mostly a repository of vile language. In its current form, Urban Dictionary is a cauldron of explanatory excess and raw prejudice. "The problem for Peckham's bottom line is that derogatory content—not the organic evolution of language in the internet era—may be the site's primary appeal," Clio Chang wrote in The New Republic in 2017, as the site was taking on its present identity.

Luckily, like language, the internet is stubbornly resistant to stasis. It is constantly reconfiguring and building anew. Today, other digital portals—Twitter, Instagram, gossip blogs like Bossip and The Shade Room , even group texts on our smartphones—function as better incubators of language than Urban Dictionary. Consider how Bossip's headline mastery functions as a direct extension of black style—which is to say the site embraces, head on, the syntax and niche vernacular of a small community of people. The endeavor is both an acknowledgement of and a lifeline to a facet of black identity.

That's not to say Urban Dictionary is vacant any good, but its utility, as a window into different communities and local subcultures, as a tool that extends sharp and luminous insight, has been obscured by darker intentions. What began as a joke is no longer funny. Even those who operate on the site understand it for what it's eroded into. The top definition for Urban Dictionary reads: "Supposed to [b]e a user-inputed dictionary for words. However, has become a mindless forum of jokes, view-points, sex, and basically anything but the real definition of a word." Where Oxford and Merriam-Webster erected walls around language, essentially controlling what words and expressions society deemed acceptable, Urban Dictionary, in its genesis, helped to democratize that process. Only the republic eventually ate itself.

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The Anatomy of the Urban Dictionary

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The Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced website that records new words and their meanings. It began life in 1999 as a parody of Dictionary.com but has since become an important resource on the Web. Indeed, judges in the U.K. famously used the site in 2005 to help them understand slang used by two rappers involved in a dispute.

Part of Urban Dictionary’s appeal is its informal approach, which allows both definitions and descriptions of words. It even allows opinions, which can sometimes be offensive. It captures new words quickly and registers many of the variations that emerge over time. A voting system allows users to show admiration or disdain, revealing words’ popularity.

Today, many millions of users rely on the site to keep them up to date with slang, common usage, and popular culture.

Of course, Urban Dictionary has its shortcomings. In the absence of style guides, editors, and moderators, the content can be vague and inaccurate. Also, little is known about the people who post new words and whether the entries reflect real changes in the language or just those that affect a small subset of people.

So just how good is the Urban Dictionary at capturing new words, and how does it compare with more conventional approaches to producing online dictionaries?

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Dong Nguyen at the Alan Turing Institute in London and a few pals, who compare the Urban Dictionary and its content with Wiktionary, another crowdsourced dictionary. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of Urban Dictionary at this scale,” they say.

Wiktionary is an interesting comparison because it takes a much more formal approach to crowdsourcing. This is a sister site to Wikipedia, run by the same Wikimedia organization. It records only word definitions and employs guidelines about how these should be compiled. It also guides users as to what constitutes a definition. Moderators edit the content, control vandalism, and aim to generate high-quality results. Unsurprisingly, Wiktionary has also become an important online resource, one that researchers increasingly use for natural-language processing and so on. 

Nguyen and co begin by analyzing the Urban Dictionary content in the broadest terms. They say it records 2,661,625 definitions for 1,620,438 words and phrases. Most words have just one definition, but a few have upwards of 1,000.

The word with the highest number of definitions is emo , with 1,204.  And the top definition is this:

• A terribly misconstrued and misused word. In contemporary culture it is utilized as a broad term to describe a multitude of children and teenagers who straighten their hair, have their hair in their face, perhaps dye it black, and wear tight clothing. Unfortunately this is completely inaccurate. Actual “emo” music existed in the late 80’s and was a subgenre of hardcore punk rock, after all, “emo” is a shortening of “Emotional hardcore punk rock.” The people in early emo bands dressed like regular people, everyday guys/girls who just played music that they enjoyed. Sadly, since the formulation and ongoing existence of Hot Topic, the term emo has been incorrectly characterized for a little more than a decade. You have to wonder how the original bands feel about the slandering and mass misunderstanding and misuse of their originality with those of the unoriginal.

By contrast, Wiktionary lists five definitions for emo :

• A particular style of hardcore punk rock 2. An individual or group of people associated with that subculture and musical style. 3. Any form of guitar-driven alternative rock that is particularly or notably emotional 4. An individual or group of people associated with a fashion or stereotype of that style of rock. 5. A young person who is considered to be over-emotional or stereotypically emo.

The word with the next highest number of definitions on Urban Dictionary is love , with 1140. The other words in the top 10 by number of definitions are: god , urban dictionary , chode , C anada’s  history , sex , school , cunt, and scene .

In terms of popularity, upvotes slightly outnumber downvotes. But, say Nguyen and co, “there is a wide variation among the definitions, with some having more than ten times more up votes than down votes and some the other way around.” 

The team also compare the lexical coverage of Urban Dictionary and Wiktionary. It turns out that the overlap is surprisingly small—72 percent of the words on Urban Dictionary are not recorded on Wiktionary. 

However, the team note that many words on Urban Dictionary are relevant to only a small subset of users. Many are nicknames or proper names such as Dan Taylor , defined as “A very wonderful man that cooks the best beef stew in the whole wide world.” These usually have only one meaning.

So to study more common words, the team also compared only those words that have two or more definitions. In that case, the overlap is much larger: just 25 percent of the definitions appear only on Urban Dictionary. For example, the word phased  appears on both dictionaries as something being done bit by bit—in phases.

However, Urban Dictionary also describes several other meanings, such as “A word that is used when your asking if someone wants to fight” and “to be ‘buzzed.’ when you arent drunk, but arent sober.”

In this analysis, many more words appear only on Wiktionary, some 69 percent of them. Nguyen and co say that many of these are encyclopedic entries such as acacetins , dramaturge , and S hakespearean sonnets .

That leads the team to a clear conclusion. “In general, we can say that the overlap between the two dictionaries is small,” they say.

Urban Dictionary meanings also include opinions, unlike those on Wiktionary. One definition of beer is this: “Possibly the best thing ever to be invented ever. I MEAN IT.”

To work out what proportion of definitions these make up, the team had crowdworkers assess each to determine whether it was an opinion or a meaning and whether they were familiar with it.

They found that up to 50 percent of meanings for proper nouns were opinions and that the workers were unfamiliar with the majority of these uses. They also found definitions such as  coffee,  “a person who is coughed upon.”

In addition, crowdworkers found that much of the Urban Dictionary content was offensive, but that this cntent  tended to get lower votes.

“We also found that words with more definitions tended to be more familiar to crowdworkers, suggesting that Urban Dictionary content does reflect broader trends in language use to some extent,” say Nguyen and co.

The work provides a unique window into a website that has come to play an important role in popular culture. That should set the scene for other studies. In particular, an interesting question is whether online dictionaries not only record linguistic change but actually drive it, as some linguists suggest.

Perhaps something for a future research project.

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How Linguists Are Using Urban Dictionary

Urban Dictionary continues a long history of recording low-brow language. It’s also a repository of a specific kind of internet immaturity.

Urban Dictionary , as you may know, is a crowdsourced website where anyone can suggest a new word—or a new definition of a word—years before establishment lexicographers catch on. It was founded in 1999 by computer science student Aaron Peckham to make fun of the comparatively staid Dictionary.com. Yet Urban Dictionary has become much more than a parody site, drawing approximately 65 million visitors every month.

Of course, Urban Dictionary is also a repository of adolescent grossout humor, often humor about sexual practices that are the stuff of urban legends (uh, penis McFlurry ?). This isn’t just a matter of trifling but ultimately harmless terms. Bigoted words and definitions have thrived on the site, but Peckham believes that offensive words should be left intact. It’s clear from a quick browse through the trending terms that the users are particularly titillated by (or nervous about) women’s bodies (e.g., twatopotamus ) and sex between men (e.g., vaginal intolerant ).

With its crowdsourced definitions and high speed of coinage, Urban Dictionary is very much a product of the internet age. But it also continues a long history of recording low-brow language: dictionaries of English slang have been around in some form for centuries. The slang dictionaries of the seventeenth century were considered useful for clueing readers into the language of thieves and cheats , which itself was part of an older tradition of exoticizing the language of the poor and criminal . By 1785, Francis Grose’s Classic Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue extended the slang lexicon beyond the middle-class conception , adding terms such as bum fodder (for toilet paper).

Urban Dictionary carries this legacy forward, and the site is likely to persist in some form. The Library of Congress now archives it. Its pages were saved to the Internet Archive more than 12,500 times between May 25, 2002, and October 4, 2019, with a steady increase over time. And according to internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch’s much-touted new book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language : “ IBM experimented with adding Urban Dictionary data to its artificial intelligence system Watson, only to scrub it all out again when the computer started swearing at them.”

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The stakes are increasing as well. Urban Dictionary is being used to determine the acceptability of vanity plate names in some U.S. states. More serious is the continued tradition of dictionary use in legal cases , where the interpretation of a single word can have grave consequences. Urban Dictionary’s definition of to nut , for instance, has been brought up in a sexual harassment claim, and the meanings of jack were debated in a financial restitution case. While Urban Dictionary’s speed may be useful in a legal setting, some lexicologists believe that depending on a crowdsourced dictionary is risky.

Linguists Open the Urban Dictionary

Whatever we might think of its vulgarity, Urban Dictionary is useful. It allows researchers to track terms that are too recent or too niche to appear in establishment dictionaries, and to determine how people are using English online.

For example, one 2006 paper by communication expert Jean E. Fox Tree uses Urban Dictionary, along with other examples of “public dictionary websites” (like Wikipedia and Answers.com), to excavate the uses of like in storytelling. And Urban Dictionary is regularly cited as a source in linguistics research, such as a 2015 paper by Natasha Shrikant on Indian American students.

McCulloch finds Urban Dictionary useful for mapping chronology, due to the datestamps attached to definitions, especially for the period in the early 2000s, before social media sites became behemoths.

Derek Denis, a linguistics researcher at the University of Toronto, agrees that the datestamp function is useful. The other key aspect, he points out, is the use of Urban Dictionary to unearth indexical meanings, or the social meanings of words. For him, the first example that comes to mind is the interjection eh . Urban Dictionary, unlike more formal dictionaries, mentions the Canadian association early and often.

In Denis’ research into Toronto’s multiethnic slang , he’s used Urban Dictionary to find the earliest documented use of terms like mans/ manz , meaning “I.” The wide-ranging, youth-oriented website might seem especially well-suited for recording this kind of multiethnolect: a dialect that draws from multiple ethnic groups, typically spoken by young people, and often stigmatized or dismissed . An example is Multicultural London English, sometimes oversimplified as “Jafaican,” for “fake Jamaican.” But Denis believes that Urban Dictionary’s applicability is broader: “It’s generally useful for not just young people and multiethnic areas but general for any speech community,” he says.

Not Exactly the Wild West

A 2010 paper by the linguist Lauren Squires suggests that, despite Urban Dictionary’s anarchic reputation, it can reproduce the idea of a division between proper and improper language, with internet language being deemed socially unacceptable. Squires gives the examples of chatspeak , defined by one user as “[a] disgrace to the English language,” and netspeak , called “[a]n easy way to determine the IQ of the person you are talking to over the Internet.”

In other words, some Urban Dictionary contributors appear to be conservatively guarding a notion of a pure (print) version of English, even though language purists consider the site itself to be a key source of corruption. But maybe this isn’t as paradoxical as it seems. It may be that the site has become a linguistic sewer because certain users feel emboldened by the format, allowing them to use (or coin) terms they wouldn’t in a more formal setting.

Urban Dictionary’s bias toward obnoxiousness might make it less a repository of slang and more a collection of a specific kind of internet immaturity. As McCulloch writes in Because Internet : “There seems to be a correlation between how genuinely popular a word is and how much Urban Dictionary’s definition writers despise it and the people who use it.”

Are its contributors just pranking would-be scholars attempting to use the site for anything other than gleeful entertainment? Well, surely some are trying to. An alternative Urban Dictionary definition of manz , “part man and part zebra,” might stem only from the cackling imagination of a single user. Researchers may need to tread carefully, particularly given that young men are overrepresented on the site.

But linguists like Denis aren’t too concerned. The premise of Urban Dictionary is that a term, however jokey or quirky, doesn’t need to be popular to be worthy of recording. In Denis’ view, it just needs to be understood by at least two people. He says that “it’s probably not completely idiosyncratic. It’s probably not just limited to that one person, but rather, it might just be that person and like two or three friends. But the important thing there is that those few people— maybe it’s two people—still form a speech community.”

In fact, the lack of restrictions, a style guide, or a core arbiter in Urban Dictionary means that “things can come out more explicitly” compared to conventional dictionaries, Denis believes. “I think the Urban Dictionary model is probably more representative because it doesn’t rely on that authority.”

It’s been argued that the now 20-year-old Urban Dictionary has become something of a fogey itself (if internet years are like dog years, the website is ancient). Newer websites and social media platforms may be even more responsive to language trends, possibly leaving Urban Dictionary in a middle ground: not as immediate as Twitter, not as specific as Know Your Meme, not as respected as Merriam-Webster, not as credible as Wikipedia, and not as popular as Reddit. But for now, linguists are digging through Urban Dictionary to track, date, and analyze language, no matter how niche or nasty, as it’s actually used.

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Definition of change

 (Entry 1 of 2)

transitive verb

intransitive verb

Definition of change  (Entry 2 of 2)

• modification
• refashioning

change , alter , vary , modify mean to make or become different.

change implies making either an essential difference often amounting to a loss of original identity or a substitution of one thing for another.

alter implies a difference in some particular respect without suggesting loss of identity.

vary stresses a breaking away from sameness, duplication, or exact repetition.

modify suggests a difference that limits, restricts, or adapts to a new purpose.

Examples of change in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'change.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Verb and Noun

Middle English, from Anglo-French changer , from Latin cambiare to exchange, probably of Celtic origin; akin to Old Irish camm crooked

13th century, in the meaning defined at transitive sense 2

13th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing change

• a change for the better
• a change for the worse
• a change of air
• a change of scene / scenery
• a leopard can't change its spots

change a baby

• change a bed
• change a flat
• change a (flat) tire
• change around
• change color
• change down
• change gear
• change hands
• change horses in midstream
• change of heart
• change of life
• change of pace
• change of plan
• change of seasons
• change of underwear
• change one's mind
• change one's opinion / views
• change one's story
• change one's tune
• change one's ways
• change order
• change over to
• change purse
• change ringing
• change round
• change someone's mind
• change (something) over to
• change the subject
• chop and change
• chump change
• chunk of change
• climate change
• climate change denial
• climate change denier
• for a change
• loose change
• make change
• rate of change
• sex change operation
• sex change surgery
• small change
• spare change
• step change
• subject to change
• the change of life
• winds of change

Articles Related to change

'Handsome,' 'Geek,' and 8 More Words...

'Handsome,' 'Geek,' and 8 More Words That Changed Their Meanings

Language evolves

Dictionary Entries Near change

Cite this entry.

“Change.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/change. Accessed 10 May. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of change.

Kids Definition of change  (Entry 2 of 2)

More from Merriam-Webster on change

Nglish: Translation of change for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of change for Arabic Speakers

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about change

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Urban Dictionary, Wordnik track evolution of language as words change, emerge

I’m a word nerd. I like learning the etymology of words and seeing how language changes over time. So I was intrigued when comedian Harris Wittels coined the term “ humblebrag ” and when Weird Al Yankovic used the word “ kardash ” to describe a unit of time measuring 72 days. Would “humblebrag” and “kardash” become mainstream, I wondered, and would they ever show up in a traditional dictionary?

As old words take on new meanings and new words emerge, questions about the fluidity of language and the meaning of words become more complicated — and more interesting. Now, thanks to sites like Urban Dictionary and Wordnik , we can track words as they evolve and see how they carry different meanings for different people at different points in time.

“If a word is persuasive enough, and if your usage is provocative enough and feels real enough, you can make a word mean what you want it to mean,” said Erin McKean , lexicographer and founder of Wordnik.com . “At Wordnik, we’re trying to redefine what meaning means.”

McKean founded the online dictionary in 2008 because she wanted a home for words that weren’t making it into traditional dictionaries.

Words can mean what we want them to mean

Just as journalism has become more data-driven in recent years, McKean said by phone, so has lexicography. Wordnik uses algorithms to search for citations or “examples” of words, which get listed next to a word’s definitions. McKean refers to the citations as “language data” — information that helps people not only understand what a word means, but how it’s being used, who’s using it, and how long it’s been around. If the word hasn’t made its way into the traditional dictionary yet, the citations stand in place of a definition.

“By showing people language data, we give people raw materials that they can use to investigate what they’re interested in,” said McKean, who used to be principal editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary. “Lexicographers are like data journalists with the tiniest beat. We report for each word in the language.”

The citations, McKean said, add context that helps people understand words in ways that definitions can’t. She described dictionary definitions as simply the “CliffNotes version” of all the citations that lexicographers read.

McKean said the question she gets asked the most is whether language is accelerating at a faster pace than years ago. It’s hard to say for sure, she said, but the multitude of platforms for sharing information certainly makes it feel more accelerated. “How would Charlie Sheen have gotten ‘ winning ‘ out there before Twitter?” she asked. “There are so many more places for people to record their language and share it without being filtered.”

People often confuse cause and effect when it comes to new words, she said. Words don’t become important because they’re added to the dictionary. They become important because of how people are using them and then they’re added to the dictionary.

Language as form of expression that has no rules

Aaron Peckham, founder of Urban Dictionary, sees new words emerge every day. Peckham started the site in college because he was using words with his friends that weren’t getting into the dictionary fast enough. Twelve years later, the site has more than six million words and gets about 25 million visitors each month.

The standards for Urban Dictionary definitions, which users submit themselves, aren’t very high. But Peckham prefers it that way. “People write really opinionated definitions and incorrect definitions. There are also ones that have poor spelling and poor grammar,” he said in a phone interview. “I think reading those makes definitions more entertaining and sometimes more accurate and honest than a heavily researched dictionary definition.”

The words and definitions on UrbanDictionary.com are often crass, but Peckham doesn’t tinker with them because they show the fluidity of language. And they show that language is constantly evolving, sometimes minute by minute. Every 30 seconds, he said, someone submits a new word to Urban Dictionary. Some words — including “ hipster ,” which was the most looked-up word on the site in 2011 — have more than 300 definitions.

“People are always adapting the language, and it’s cool to see that reflected somewhere,” Peckham said.

Peckham sees language as a form of expression that has no rules and is open for interpretation. “When you write a news article, you follow a particular style, but I don’t think there really needs to be a consistent model when it comes to defining language,” he said. “Just because people misspell things, (whether intentionally or unintentionally), or people don’t use correct grammar, it doesn’t mean their expression isn’t valid.”

He considers traditional dictionaries to be too authoritative because they make it seem as though there’s only one right way to define a word. People, he said, should have the option of creating their own definitions that contribute to a collective understanding of words.

“The part of Urban Dictionary that I love the most and that I want to protect is its personality. People write really witty definitions, and they aren’t taking it very seriously,” he said. “I feel like that’s what distinguishes Urban Dictionary from other dictionaries and Wikipedia. It’s not trying to be the authority, and it’s not trying to be without an opinion.”

Getting a word on the site is easy: Users submit a word, a small group of volunteers approves it, and it goes up on the site. Definitions are listed by popularity, which is determined by how many users give the word a thumbs-up.

Getting a word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is a bit — OK, a lot — more complicated.

Taking time to track a word’s evolution

Throughout the year, Merriam-Webster Dictionary editors look at news stories, books and menus in search of new words. They keep running lists of how words are used and how often they’re used. “Finding citations is the first step,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large. “Each word has to have a body of evidence that shows it’s increasing in use, and it has to have a clear meaning. That sometimes can take a number of years.”

New words aren’t added to MerriamWebster.com until they’re added to the print version. The site does, however, have a section called “ New Words and Slang ,” which features words that users submit. Unlike Urban Dictionary, Merriam-Webster tweaks users’ definitions so that they conform to the dictionary’s style.

Some of the words in the section are pretty creative — “Upscalator” (an escalator that goes up); freighbor (a friend who’s a neighbor) and “textitis” (pain in the thumbs from frequent texting). Other words, such as “jeggings” and “hashtag,” are so familiar and commonly used that it’s almost disappointing they’re not yet in the dictionary. “Tweet,” “helicopter parent” and “boomerang child” are a few of the 150 or so words that were added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary last year .

Once Merriam-Webster decides a word should be added, junior editors craft a rough definition, which then goes through a copy editor and the editor-in-chief (known internally as the “director of defining.”)

Sokolowski said he likes the idea of sites like Urban Dictionary and Wordnik, but believes people need well-crafted definitions to really understand words.

“Putting a lot of examples of a single word in a single place is certainly the first step toward understanding a word, but citations aren’t definitions,” Sokolowski said. “In our experience, selecting and crafting good examples and then deriving standardized definitions from them is a helpful thing.”

He pointed out that words with subtle differences in meaning (such as “effect” and “affect”) are often the most looked-up words on MerriamWebster.com. “We want to help people understand these shades of meaning,” he said, noting that the site gets more than 100 million page views each month.

News coverage often drives the most looked-up words. When Andy Rooney died, for instance, Sokolowski noticed that people started looking up the word “curmudgeon” because they were reading it in obituaries. One of the most looked-up words of 2011 was “mercurial,” which Sokolowski describes as “a word favored by journalists who are covering a prominent and controversial figure.” Journalists, he said, used it to describe Keith Olbermann , Steve Jobs , Kim Jong Il and Moammar Gadhafi ,  and searches for the definition of the word spiked as a result.

Whether they’re looking up words in the traditional dictionary, trying to make sense of new words, or making up their own on Urban Dictionary, people are interested in language — and how it’s evolving. Last week, the American Dialect Society chose “occupy” as the 2011 Word of the Year , in part because it was an older word that developed new uses and meanings.

“One of the reasons we put the heart in the Wordnik logo is because we believe people really love words,” McKean told me. “We should make exploring words and finding meaning and connecting meaning as fun an experience as possible. Some sites make you feel like you should be punished for looking up a word. We like you to feel rewarded.”

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New Terms We Added To Our Slang Dictionary

Why is everyone suddenly tweeting about OK boomer ? What is that Baby Yoda meme all up in our feeds about? And who are Becky and Karen , anyways?

Oh, we’ve got this.

We love keeping up with the latest terms in slang and getting to the bottom of the funniest, strangest, and, yes, thorniest trends in pop culture and social media. We love it so much, in fact, we maintain our own slang dictionary dedicated to them—and it just got a fresh, new look. (It’s looking pretty on point if you ask us.)

So, we thought we would highlight some of our faves from our updates in the last six months or so. Remember, not all of these terms themselves are brand new; we’re just showing ‘em off as new additions. Because slang.

WATCH: Words That The Internet Has Changed

First off, what is the slang dictionary.

Now, we consider the definitions in our slang dictionary informal. That is, the words aren’t defined and entered like terms are in our core dictionary (you know, the one on the homepage ), but instead we provide a little more backstory and context about them in a more casual format. If you’re curious, here’s how words get into our good ole traditional dictionary .

But, entries in our slang (and our other nontraditional dictionaries) are still thoroughly researched, carefully defined, and rigorously fact-checked—just written with a more casual tone. That way, we’re not—and you’re not—droppin’ VSCO girl into convos only to be met with that dreaded, eye-rolling response, “Um, that was SO last year.”

What’s more, many of the slang terms we define do go on to get their very own, official dictionary pages. And of course, many won’t, as they are but moments, even if much buzzed about on Twitter, in the discourse. Sorry, Hype House …

Alright, without further ado, here are 20 of our favorite new additions with their definitions. Be sure to click on the heading for more info, and sign up for our Slang Decoder so you never miss a beat !

And I oop is a viral phrase from a video by drag queen Jasmine Masters. It has since become stereotyped as a catchphrase of VSCO girls . And I oop or I oop can be playfully used to express shock, surprise, or embarrassment.

Baby Yoda is the popular name for a character known as the Child in the Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian . He is a member of the same species as the beloved Star Wars character, Yoda. Baby Yoda ‘s adorable, lovable appearance helped make the character a widespread meme online.

Becky is a stereotype for a white woman, especially one who is unaware or takes advantage of her social privilege. Becky is also used more generally to mock a young white woman as “ basic .”

Online, people post big mood as a way to react to or describe something they find relatable or resonant in some way. Big mood can at once capture a feeling at a specific moment but also comment on a broader sentiment about life in general. (Yeah, existential stuff … )

Big mood is also often posted with a joking, judgmental, cheerful, or ironic tone in reaction and in response to content that is variously seen as quirky, genuine, dramatic, or ridiculous.

cancel culture

Cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.

Cheetle is the brand name for the powdery residue that gets on your fingertips while eating the savory cheese snack, Cheetos®.

chef’s kiss

Chef’s kiss is a gesture and expression meant to show something is perfect or excellent. The gesture is made by pinching the fingers and thumb of one hand together (often in an OK sign), kissing them, and then tossing them dramatically away from the lips. Its tone can be sincere or ironic.

hold my beer

Hold my beer is an expression joked about being said before an unthinking person does something dangerous or stupid. On the internet, hold my beer is used to make fun of decisions (that are seen to be bad) made by public figures or companies.

Hype House is a collective of young social media content creators and influencers who are especially popular on the video app TikTok . It is also the name of the mansion in Los Angeles the group uses and some members live in.

Karen is a mocking slang term for an entitled, obnoxious, middle-aged white woman. Especially as featured in memes, Karen is generally stereotyped as having a blonde bob haircut, asking to speak to retail and restaurant managers to voice complaints or make demands, and being a nagging, often divorced mother from Generation X.

A manther is the male version of a cougar , or a middle-aged woman who has the hots for younger men. Manthers are older men who pursue partners significantly younger than them.

Megxit is a slang term for the decision of couple Meghan Markle and Prince Harry to step back from their senior roles in the British royal family.

OK boomer is a viral internet slang phrase used, often in a humorous or ironic manner, to call out or dismiss out-of-touch or close-minded opinions associated with the baby boomer generation and older people more generally.

porch pirate

A porch pirate is a thief who steals packages delivered to front doorsteps or porches. They especially strike during the holiday season, when people order many gifts online for home delivery.

Rapinoeing is a viral victory pose named after professional soccer superstar Megan Rapinoe. It involves raising and outstretching the arms at an angle in a confident, joyful display.

self-partnered

Self-partnered is an alternative for the word single as a relationship status. It was popularized by Emma Watson in a November 2019 interview with Vogue .

Sksksk is an interjection used to convey surprise, happiness, and other intense emotions. It’s stereotyped as an overused expression of VSCO girls on social media.

The goalie dribbles into the outfield for a touchdown! Sportsball is a mildly critical or humorous term used by people who admit they don’t know or care about sports. Sports fans sometimes use it, too, as a playful way to refer to sports they like.

VSCO girl is a term, generally used as an insult, for a young, usually white woman who posts trendy pictures of herself edited on the app VSCO.

Stereotypes of the VSCO girl include wearing scrunchies and Birkenstock sandals, drinking out of Hydro Flask reusable water canisters, saying sksksk and (and) I oop , and generally seeking attention online.

A zoomer is an informal term for a member of Generation Z , born in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It can be used with a neutral, mocking, or ironic tone.

Want to discover more? Check out our emoji, memes, pop culture, and gender and sexuality dictionaries—and much more!

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Meaning of change in English

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change verb ( BECOME DIFFERENT )

• change She'll always be like that - you can't change her.
• alter We've had to alter our plans.
• vary Try to vary the children's diet a little.
• convert We're going to convert the spare bedroom into an office.
• turn into There are plans to turn his latest book into a film.
• transform The riverside area has been transformed into a shopping and sports complex.
• He said that he hadn't seen the traffic light change to red .
• They all tried to persuade him to change his decision .
• We don't expect the economic situation to change anytime soon .
• It sounds to me like you ought to change jobs .
• The weather in the hills can change very quickly , so take suitable clothing .
• make an about-turn
• make something into something
• metamorphose
• revolutionize
• sanitization
• semi-domesticated

change verb ( TRANSPORT )

• This train will terminate at the next stop - passengers who wish to continue should change trains .
• You should stay on the train until Manchester and then change.
• The only thing I'm worried about is changing trains at Kings Cross .
• You'll have to change buses when you get into Victoria, but your next bus doesn't leave for half an hour .
• It's an awkward trip - you have to change several times .
• around Robin Hood's barn idiom
• communication
• public transport
• super-commuting
• transoceanic
• well travelled

change verb ( MONEY )

• Can you change a tenner for two fivers ?
• You can't pay in English money . You'll have to change some money at the bank .
• I need to change some of these travellers cheques .
• Will they change money at the hotel ?
• He kindly changed my foreign currency for me.
• bank balance
• bank manager
• bank statement
• building society
• cash drawer
• challenger bank
• clearing bank
• electronic banking
• investment bank
• quantitative easing
• stop a cheque phrase
• stress test
• the Bank of England
• the Square Mile

change verb ( CLOTHES/BEDS )

• You are going to change, aren't you? You can't go in those tatty old jeans .
• When did you last change the linen on the children's beds ?
• I hadn't even changed when our first guests arrived , so Jeff had to cope on his own.
• I usually insist that he changes out of his work clothes before dinner .
• Can you make sure your brother doesn't walk in when I'm changing?
• bundle ( someone ) up
• doll yourself up
• glam (yourself) up
• make yourself respectable idiom
• respectable
• rig someone out
• slip into something

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

change verb ( WIND/SEA )

• atmospheric river
• flash flood

change verb ( SPEED )

• aquaplaning
• back someone up
• biting point
• pull someone up
• range anxiety

Phrasal verbs

Change noun ( becoming different ).

• The minister has announced that there will be no change in government policy .
• The holiday was a welcome change.
• A lot of people were caught out by the sudden change in the weather .
• You're not planning a change of career , are you?
• The country is crying out for a change in leadership .
• anti-evolutionism
• be ahead of the curve idiom
• fluctuation
• for a change
• reformation
• regime change
• reinterpretation
• retransformation

change noun ( MONEY )

• Here's your change, darling .
• She delved into her pocket to find some change.
• He fumbled in his pockets for some change.
• He carefully pocketed his change.
• "Have you got any change?" "Sorry, I've only got a five-pound note ."
• anti-kickback
• automatic withdrawal
• meal ticket
• monetization
• monometallic
• Monopoly money
• wave and pay

change noun ( CLOTHES )

Change noun ( transport ), change noun ( baseball ).

• 1-2-3 inning
• around the horn idiom
• hit the ball out of the park idiom
• hitting coach
• split-fingered fastball
• squeeze play
• starting pitcher

change | American Dictionary

Change noun ( clothes/beds ), change | business english, examples of change, collocations with change.

These are words often used in combination with change .

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

Translations of change

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Word of the Day

relating to or caused by an earthquake

Varied and diverse (Talking about differences, Part 1)

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• change (BECOME DIFFERENT)
• change your mind
• change for the better
• change your ways
• change (TRANSPORT)
• change (MONEY)
• change (CLOTHES/BEDS)
• change (WIND/SEA)
• change (SPEED)
• change (BECOMING DIFFERENT)
• change of scene
• change (CLOTHES)
• a change of clothes
• change (BASEBALL)
• change hands
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An Amish Oil Change Is Even More Disgusting Than Changing the Oil in a Car

Dec. 7 2023, Published 10:43 a.m. ET

• The term "Amish oil change" has been circulating on TikTok recently, and it has two definitions that are nasty in different ways.
• The first involves a procedure that ensures that a horse has regular bowel movements, and the second involves performing a sexual act on the animal.
• Frankly, we would encourage you to avoid trying either definition on your own if you can avoid it.

While there are plenty of people who know how to change the oil in their cars, even those who are particularly good with cars may be confused by the idea of an Amish oil change. The phrase, which has trended on TikTok , seems to be a paradoxical take on the phase. After all, the Amish quite famously don't drive cars.

Although the idea of an Amish oil change predates the internet, the phrase has become much more well known in large part thanks to its appearance on TikTok. Now, many people want to know what it means.

What is an Amish oil change on TikTok?

In a car, oil changes are a necessary part of maintenance. If you don't change the oil in your car regularly, it won't work anymore.

The same is true for horses, who are living beings in their own right. They're also key to many people's livelihoods, including the Amish. Just like cars, horses need to be taken care of if you want them to carry you from place to place like the Amish do. The Amish also use horses to plow fields instead of using big machinery.

An Amish oil change refers to a particularly nasty procedure that anyone, Amish or not, who has a horse may have had to do at some point. If a horse is sick and hasn't been pooping regularly, its caretakers may have to put on a glove that goes all the way up to their shoulder. They reach into the horse's rear end and unblock it so that it can once again have regular bowel movements.

Suddenly, the dirt required to change the oil on your car doesn't seem too bad. For many non-Amish horse owners, they would call a veterinarian to come out and treat the horse — Amish oil change included. Although the Amish likely take care of a blockage themselves, most horse owners will pay a professional.

The term "Amish oil change" came about because it's a little bit like changing the oil on your car.

It's a fairly clever turn of phrase that describes a pretty nasty part of animal care. Still, if you're someone who works with horses regularly, you're likely familiar with how gross the work can be at times.

@yodertoter40 My Amish father taught me at age 13 how to do an Amish oil change.😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂 ♬ original sound - Eli Yoder

Urban Dictionary has an even grosser definition of the term.

If you've seen the term on TikTok, the definition explained above might be the one being used, but it's also possible that an even grosser definition is the one you're seeing.

According to Urban Dictionary , an Amish oil change is "when a woman performs Fellatio on a horse and spits the cum out."

Welp. Frankly, the less said about that particular definition of the term, the better.

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How-To Geek

What does "dp" mean on social media, and how do you use it.

Have you updated your DP lately?

Quick Links

Display pictures, where are dps from, the culture of dps, pictures, pictures everywhere.

If you're on social media, there's a good chance that you have a DP. Here's what this acronym means and why you might run into it on the internet.

DP means "display picture" or, less commonly, "display photo." It's the image representing you on a social network or any website. This acronym is widely used on Twitter, but it can also crop up anywhere on the internet or even in real-life conversations. For instance, you might say, "My DP looks so bad," to your friend who's standing right next to you.

You can also use "DP" as a verb about a picture you're going to turn into your photo. For example, if you see a lovely image of your friend, you might say, "You should dp this picture of yourself on the beach!" Your DP usually shows ups next to your name in posts and comments.

People typically write this acronym in the lowercase "dp." It's part of a "profile," a group of identifying inputs on a website such as your display name , location, website, bio , and sometimes a cover photo . Depending on your level of anonymity on a particular website, you can opt to have all of these or none of these be accurate information.

Display photos are a relatively recent invention. In the very earliest days of the internet, most chatrooms were entirely text-based and used a system known as Internet Relay Chat or IRC. However, during the early 2000s, message boards started popping up that allowed users to set an "avatar," a common way of calling digital display photos at the time.

Related: How to Change Your Profile Picture on Facebook

It wasn't until the invention of Facebook, and later Twitter and Instagram, that adding a picture of yourself became a common practice. Nowadays, display photos are an essential component of any social networking site, messaging app, or nearly anything that requires you to make an account. They're an invaluable way to help us visualize the people on the internet. People who don't have a DP are often called "randoms."

The first definition for DP on the internet slang database Urban Dictionary was created in June 2009 and reads "acronym for display picture." The passage highlights its use in social networks and instant messaging systems, which were common at the time.

Related: Why 2020 Is the Perfect Time to Revisit IRC

At first glance, picking a display picture might seem straightforward. Snap a picture of yourself , upload it, and that's the image people will know you by. However, in the last few years, a few unusual quirks have influenced the way people perceive display images.

On Twitter, it's common to have your display image be from a "fandom" you identify with if you're a " stan " or an intense fan. So, for example, if you're a big fan of a particular sports team, you might have the team's star player as your image. Fans usually do this to self-identify to other fans, giving them the ability to find other people in their community quickly.

Related: 6 Tips for Taking Better Selfies

DPs can also create assumptions. For example, Twitter is famous for having constant "discourse," where many users have long discussions with hundreds of tweet replies. Since your DP is the only way someone can visualize who you are, it can significantly influence the conversation.

Lastly, your DP can be a topic of conversation. Facebook creates a timeline post whenever you change your profile image, so people can comment on post stories or Tweets that draw attention to their recently changed display images.

If you have multiple social media accounts, you might notice that each website has a different term for its version of a display picture. However, "display picture" remains one of the most common ways to refer to a profile image -- dating back to instant messaging apps from the late 2000s. That's why so many people refer to any internet avatar or display image as their DP.

While many people refer to these images as "profile pictures" as well, this doesn't have a shortened version on the internet. That's why "DP" is the go-to term for websites like Twitter, which have character limits. Ironically, while you mostly see "DP" deployed on Twitter because of the culture on the website, Twitter itself calls these images "profile pictures."

Here are a few examples of different naming conventions for a display picture on the internet:

• Facebook :  Profile Picture
• Instagram  and Google : Profile Photo
• Discord :  Avatar

You might also stumble into anonymous communities where adding a picture is uncommon, such as Reddit. People usually pick a random image or a non-human avatar on these websites.

Related: How to Change Your Discord Profile Picture