Urban Dictionary Scraper 🗣️

Scrape Urban Dictionary slang definitions, usage examples, up/down votes, vote ratio and author for any term — straight from Urban Dictionary's clean public JSON API. No API key, no login, no cookies.

Perfect for building slang / NLP datasets, social listening, content research and trend tracking. Two modes: look up a list of terms, or pull a stream of random definitions.

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✨ What it does

• 🔎 Define mode — pass any list of terms (rizz, yeet, ghosting, …) and get every published definition for each.
• 🎲 Random mode — fetch a batch of random Urban Dictionary definitions for discovery and dataset building.
• 📊 Structured, clean output — votes, ratio, author, ISO timestamps and permalinks, ready for analysis.
• 🧹 Light text cleaning — normalises \r\n, keeps the original [bracketed] cross-link markup as readable text.
• ⚡ Fast HTTP-only scraping with a Chrome browser fingerprint (curl_cffi) plus a stdlib fallback.

💸 Pricing

Runs on tiny memory (512 MB) and pure API calls, so it's cheap: roughly $0.5 per 1,000 definitions. Actual cost depends on your Apify plan and platform usage.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select (define | random)	define looks up your terms; random fetches random definitions. Default define.
terms	array of strings	Terms to look up in define mode. Prefilled with ["rizz","yeet","ghosting"].
maxItems	integer	Max number of definition records to collect (1–1000). Default 100.

Example input

{
  "mode": "define",
  "terms": ["rizz", "yeet", "ghosting"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

📤 Output

Each dataset item is one definition:

{
  "word": "Rizz",
  "definition": "Another word for spitting [game]/how good [you are] with pulling and sustaining partners.",
  "example": "Person 1: are you from [Tennessee] cuz u the only ten i see ;)",
  "thumbs_up": 750,
  "thumbs_down": 250,
  "ratio": 0.75,
  "author": "bro got no rizz",
  "written_on": "2022-03-31T10:36:17+00:00",
  "permalink": "https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rizz&defid=17115763",
  "defid": 17115763,
  "source": "urban-dictionary",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-24T00:00:00+00:00"
}

Field	Description
word	The term / headword.
definition	Definition text (cleaned, [brackets] kept, capped 5000 chars).
example	Usage example (cleaned, capped 3000 chars).
thumbs_up / thumbs_down	Up / down votes.
ratio	thumbs_up / (thumbs_up + thumbs_down), rounded to 2 decimals.
author	Username of the submitter.
written_on	Submission timestamp in ISO-8601 UTC.
permalink	Direct URL to the definition.
defid	Urban Dictionary definition ID.
source	Always urban-dictionary.
scraped_at	When the record was scraped (ISO-8601 UTC).

All fields are nullable.

🧑‍💻 Use cases

• Slang & NLP datasets — build labelled corpora of informal language for model training.
• Social listening — decode slang appearing in comments, DMs and reviews.
• Content & copywriting — research how audiences actually use a term before you write.
• Trend research — track new slang and its adoption over time.

🔗 Related actors

• Wiktionary Scraper
• Dictionary Scraper
• Reddit Scraper
• Wikipedia Scraper

⚖️ Notes

This actor scrapes publicly available data from Urban Dictionary's public API. Use responsibly and in line with Urban Dictionary's terms and applicable law.