Where do Slangora definitions come from?

Three places: community contributions, openly-licensed imports (Wiktionary CC BY-SA 4.0, Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary 1898–1905), and editorial writing by Slangora staff. Imported entries are clearly attributed in the source line under each definition.

Why don't all entries have a source URL?

Most slang has no "first source" you can link to. A word that started on a single Twitch stream in 2022 is rarely traceable to that stream. We attribute where we can — Wiktionary entries link back to Wiktionary, Reddit-mined examples link back to the original thread — but for genuinely community-written definitions, the community is the source.

Yes. Each term has a permalink (e.g. https://slangora.com/word/rizz). For academic or journalistic citation, include the term, the URL, and the date you accessed the entry — definitions are versioned and may change.

How are disputed origins handled?

When two communities credibly claim to have coined the same word, both origin stories appear in the etymology section, and a note flags the dispute. We try not to flatten complicated histories into a single "actually this came from X" sentence when the evidence doesn't support it.

Citation policy

Where definitions come from, how attribution works, and what to do when the historical record is messy.

Three sources, clearly labeled

Every definition on Slangora carries a source line. The three categories are:

Community — written by a Slangora user, ranked by community votes, reviewed by an editor before going live.
Imported — pulled from openly-licensed dictionaries. The two major imports are Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905, public domain). Both are linked from each affected entry.
Editorial — written by Slangora staff, usually as a rewrite of a thin imported entry. Editorial entries carry an editor byline.

Real-world example citations

Where possible, we attach real usage examples to a definition — a Reddit comment, a YouTube transcript line, a tweet, a Bluesky post. Each example carries the source type, the original publication date, the region (if relevant), and a link back to the source. These are kept separate from the "handcrafted example" field so the provenance is always clear.

When the origin is unknown

Slang rarely has a clean origin story. A word might appear in three communities within a month with no clear ancestor. When that happens, we say so — the etymology field will note "origin disputed" or list the candidate origins side by side rather than picking one and pretending. The first-attestation year, when we can extract one from the etymology, is a lower bound, not a definitive coinage date.

Wiktionary attribution

Wiktionary content is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Any entry derived from Wiktionary retains an attribution line linking back to the Wiktionary article. If you redistribute a Wiktionary-derived Slangora entry, your derivative must also be CC BY-SA 4.0 compatible.

Citing Slangora

For academic, journalistic, or research citation, please include the term, the full permalink, and the date you accessed the entry. Definitions are versioned — you can see the edit history on each definition — so the access date matters.

Slangora. (Accessed YYYY-MM-DD). "rizz." https://slangora.com/word/rizz