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.

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture ...

Not long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Pageviews were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company’s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google’s algorithms had punished ...

For centuries, lexicographers have attempted to capture the entire English language. Technology might soon turn this dream into reality – but will it spell the end for dictionaries? By Andrew Dickson ...