The Lamp Urban Dictionary

a device for producing illumination, originally a vessel containing a wick soaked in combustible material and subsequently such other light-producing instruments as gas and electric lamps.

The earliest examples of the word lamp come from ancient Greece, where it was used to describe a torch or lantern. Its modern English meaning, however, has expanded to include all kinds of devices that give off light and, in the figurative sense, any kind of source of light.

UD is an online crowd-sourced dictionary, founded in December 1999, where users contribute definitions and etymologies for headwords they choose. There is little curation, so a word may have multiple entries and some definitions are more popular than others. Moreover, UD definitions often reflect the opinions of the authors and may therefore be biased.

While UD is a valuable resource, it is important to take into account its limitations when using it. One such limitation is that the site contains a great deal of slang and colloquialisms, which are not always found in traditional dictionaries.

In addition, UD definitions sometimes contain idioms, abbreviations and emoticons that are not in the Oxford English Dictionary and that can make it difficult to determine whether an entry is a legitimate word or merely a slang term.

Despite these limitations, UD is still an excellent source for analyzing the evolution of new words and expressions. It can be used to identify patterns in slang and idioms, which is particularly useful in language teaching and research. It can also help with word formation and pronunciation, since it provides many examples of how a new word is used in a particular context.

A study of UD shows that it is growing rapidly. Its total number of entries is increasing by approximately 10% per week. In the same period, the number of new headwords added to Wiktionary has remained relatively stable.

Moreover, UD is better at capturing the development of slang terms than other dictionary sources, including the Oxford American Dictionary and the Cambridge English Dictionary. This is mainly because UD definitions are updated quickly and are not filtered by editors. In addition, UD allows its users to express their evaluation of a given definition by up and down voting. Figure 4a shows that the percentage of up votes is much higher for UD than for Wiktionary.