Editorial policy
How definitions are reviewed, sourced, and corrected on Slangora.
What you're reading
Slangora is a living slang dictionary built to explain what words actually mean, where they come from, who uses them, whether they're still current, and whether you should use them. Every entry on the site falls into one of three categories of trust:
- Editor verified — a human editor has read the entry, checked it against real-world usage, and signed off on the meaning.
- Community — written and ranked by Slangora users. Top-voted community definitions outrank older or lower-quality ones on the term page.
- Imported — sourced from openly-licensed dictionaries (Wiktionary CC BY-SA 4.0, Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary) and clearly attributed. These are the seed corpus we've been progressively rewriting and enriching.
The review pipeline
- A definition is submitted — by a user, an import script, or an editor.
- It enters the moderation queue at
/admin, unpublished. - A moderator checks it against the submission guidelines and the sensitive-language policy.
- If approved, it goes live and is visible to readers and crawlers.
- Edits after publish are versioned — every change is recorded with timestamp and editor, viewable via the edit-history button on each definition.
What we reject
- Slurs presented approvingly, or content that amplifies harassment.
- Pure fabrication — words made up on the spot with no evidence of use.
- Duplicates of existing approved definitions (vote or comment instead).
- Definitions that are only a punchline, with no real meaning.
- Spam, link dumps, or SEO content.
Currentness and lifecycle
Slang doesn't stay still. Where we can tell, entries are marked with a lifecycle state — emerging, mainstream, fading, historical, and so on. A term being old or out of fashion isn't a reason to delete it; it's a reason to label it accurately so a reader in 2030 still knows what it meant in 2020.
Corrections and disputes
If a definition is wrong, outdated, or missing important context, please tell us. Every definition card has a report button, and the corrections page is a faster path for substantive feedback. We read everything; we don't always agree, but we'll explain why if we don't make the change.
No AI-generated definitions
Slangora doesn't use generative AI to write the user-facing dictionary. Definitions are human-written or imported from openly-licensed sources, with clear attribution. We do use deterministic tooling for sorting the moderation queue and for flagging quality issues — but the words you read on a term page were written by a person.