🗣️ Urban Dictionary Definitions Scraper

🚀 Export crowd-sourced slang in seconds. Pull definitions, examples, votes, and audio links for any term, a stream of random entries, or the curated word of the day. No API key, no login, no rate-limit headaches.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-26 · 📊 14 fields per record · 🗣️ 12M+ entries · 🌍 global English slang · 🎲 3 collection modes

The Urban Dictionary Definitions Scraper taps the same live feed that powers the urbandictionary.com homepage and returns 14 fields per record, including the definition, example sentence, author handle, community upvotes and downvotes, score, an autogenerated card image, a text-to-speech audio link, and a permalink. Urban Dictionary is the largest open repository of contemporary slang, with 12M+ user-submitted entries spanning street talk, gaming jargon, internet acronyms, regional expressions, and brand-new coinages.

The catalog updates continuously as the community votes and contributes. This Actor exposes three workflows in one input form: define a list of specific terms, pull a random sample for trend mining, or grab the Word of the Day feed for daily content pipelines. All three modes return identical record shapes so your downstream code stays simple.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Linguists, social-media tools, content marketers, NLP researchers, brand-safety teams, dictionary apps, journalists	Slang dictionaries, brand monitoring, content moderation training, NLP labeling, trend research, conversational AI

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📋 What the Urban Dictionary Scraper does

Three collection workflows in a single run:

• 🔍 Define mode. Look up an exact list of terms and pull every competing definition ranked by community votes.
• 🎲 Random mode. Stream unrelated definitions for sampling, training data, or content discovery.
• 📅 Word of the Day mode. Fetch the curated daily feed for editorial pipelines and slack-bots.

Each record includes the slang word, the full definition, a usage example, the author's display name, upvotes, downvotes, a computed net score, the autogenerated social card image, the text-to-speech audio URL, the canonical permalink, and the original posting date.

💡 Why it matters: slang moves fast, and a phrase that was a meme last week can be a brand-safety risk tomorrow. Building your own crawler means parsing dynamic pages, handling permalinks, and refreshing every few hours. This Actor returns the structured data on demand, so your dictionary, moderator, or marketing tool stays on the pulse.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.
mode	enum	"define"	One of define, random, wordOfTheDay.
terms	array	["yeet","cap","fire","slay","vibes"]	Slang words to look up in define mode. Each term returns multiple ranked definitions.
minThumbsUp	integer	0	Drop any definition with fewer upvotes than this threshold.

Example: top definitions for five popular slang words.

{
    "maxItems": 25,
    "mode": "define",
    "terms": ["yeet", "cap", "fire", "slay", "vibes"]
}

Example: today's curated Word of the Day entries.

{
    "maxItems": 10,
    "mode": "wordOfTheDay"
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Urban Dictionary is community-moderated and content can be vulgar, satirical, or offensive. Apply a profanity filter or moderator review before surfacing entries directly to end-users. The Word of the Day feed is editorially curated and safer for default display.

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📊 Output

Each record contains 14 fields. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
🖼️ imageUrl	string	"https://udimg.com/v1/social/twitter.webp?word=Yeet&..."
🆔 defid	number	12339851
🗣️ word	string	"Yeet"
✍️ author	string	"Le anonymous"
📖 definition	string	"To discard an item at a high velocity"
💬 example	string	"Alex (while throwing the can): YEET!"
👍 thumbsUp	number	1842
👎 thumbsDown	number	233
📊 score	number	1609
🔊 audioUrl	string | null	"https://cdn.urbdic.com/audio/tts/.../yeet.mp3"
🎵 soundUrls	array	["https://cdn.urbdic.com/audio/tts/.../yeet.mp3"]
🔗 permalink	string	"https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yeet&defid=12339851"
📅 wordOfTheDayDate	string | null	"2026-05-25"
🕒 writtenOn	ISO 8601	"2018-04-22T00:00:00.000Z"
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	"2026-05-26T00:08:47.438Z"

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🌍	Massive catalog. 12M+ user-submitted slang entries spanning two decades of internet culture.
🎯	Three modes in one Actor. Define specific terms, pull random samples, or grab the curated daily feed.
📊	Quality signal built in. Upvotes, downvotes, and a computed score let you filter out joke definitions.
🖼️	Visual and audio extras. Each entry ships with an autogenerated card image and a text-to-speech audio link.
⚡	Fast. 5 definitions in under a second, hundreds per minute.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run hits the live feed, so your dataset reflects today's slang.
🚫	No authentication. Public crowd-sourced data, no login or API key required.

📊 Slang is one of the fastest-moving signals in language. Brands, moderators, and content tools that miss new coinages get caught off-guard.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ Urban Dictionary Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	12M+ entries	Live per run	term, random, word of the day, min upvotes	⚡ 2 min
Manual website browsing	Free	Limited by clicks	Manual	None	🐢 Hours
Building your own crawler	Engineering time	Full	Custom	Custom	⏳ Days
Static slang lists	Free or cheap	Frozen in time	Never	None	🕒 Variable

Pick this Actor when you want live community data, ready-to-use scoring, and zero pipeline maintenance.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Urban Dictionary Definitions Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a mode, drop in your terms (or leave it random), and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

🛡️ Content Moderation & Brand Safety Train profanity classifiers with current slang Flag ambiguous brand names against community definitions Build moderation glossaries that stay current Audit user-generated content for emerging coded language	📱 Dictionary Apps & Chatbots Power slang lookups inside translation apps Add a "what does this mean" button to messengers Voice assistants that decode TikTok-era vocabulary Glossary panels for parents and educators
📰 Marketing & Trend Research Spot rising slang for ad copy and social campaigns Track Gen-Z vocabulary shifts quarter over quarter Build editorial calendars around Word of the Day Compare brand mentions against community definitions	🧠 NLP & Conversational AI Augment training sets with informal English Improve named-entity recognition on social text Bootstrap intent classifiers with real-world examples Evaluate LLM understanding of contemporary slang

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🔌 Automating Urban Dictionary Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify API documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Daily Word of the Day pulls or hourly term refreshes keep downstream dictionaries and Slack bots in sync automatically.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Sociolinguistics studies of slang propagation Computational humor and meme research datasets Comparative dictionaries of informal English Internet-culture archives for digital humanities	🎨 Personal and creative Trivia bots and word-of-the-day Slack apps Vocabulary expansion games for language learners Generative art that visualizes definitions Personal slang journals and TikTok content prompts
🤝 Non-profit and civic Educator resources for understanding student vernacular Translator references for crisis hotlines and youth services Civic dashboards tracking emerging coded language Volunteer moderator toolkits for community forums	🧪 Experimentation Fine-tune small LLMs on contemporary slang Prototype voice assistants with real Gen-Z input Benchmark sentiment models on informal text Test image-card generators with definition prompts

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Pick a mode, list your terms (or leave them empty for random or daily mode), click Start, and the Actor fetches the live community feed and emits a clean structured record per definition. No browser automation, no captchas, no setup.

📏 How accurate are the votes?

Vote counts reflect the current community state at the moment of the run. Older entries tend to have larger vote totals, while recent submissions may still be accumulating signal. Use the score field (upvotes minus downvotes) as a quality proxy.

🔁 How often is the data refreshed?

The Urban Dictionary catalog updates continuously as users submit and vote. Every run of this Actor fetches the latest data, so your dataset reflects current entries as of run time.

🎲 Can I use it for trend research?

Yes. Run the random mode on a schedule to sample new entries, or pull the Word of the Day feed daily to track curator picks. Both modes work well as inputs to NLP pipelines.

🛡️ Will I get explicit content?

Maybe. Community submissions can be vulgar, satirical, or offensive. Apply a profanity filter or moderator review before surfacing entries directly to end-users. The minThumbsUp filter helps drop low-quality joke entries.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor hourly, daily, or weekly and keep a downstream dictionary, Slack bot, or moderation feed in sync.

⚖️ Is this data legal to use?

Urban Dictionary content is publicly accessible and the Actor only collects what any visitor can read. Review the source's terms for your specific use case, especially for commercial redistribution.

💼 Can I use this data commercially?

Yes, with care. The raw definitions and metadata are public, but redistribution of large excerpts may require attribution or rights review depending on your product. Consult counsel for high-volume commercial use.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to use this Actor?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs (10 records per run). A paid plan lifts the limit and gives you access to scheduling, higher concurrency, and larger datasets.

🔁 What happens if a run fails or gets interrupted?

Apify automatically retries transient errors. If a run still fails, you can inspect the log in the Runs tab, fix the input, and re-run. Partial datasets from failed runs are preserved so you never lose progress.

🆘 What if I need help?

Our support team is here to help. Contact us through the Apify platform or use the Tally form linked below.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

Urban Dictionary Definitions Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe slang data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh slang into your dictionary backend, or alert your team in Slack with the daily Word of the Day.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Urban Dictionary, LLC. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available crowd-sourced data is collected.