  As an online, crowd-sourced, open English-language slang dictionary, the
Urban Dictionary platform contains a wealth of opinions, jokes, and definitions
of terms, phrases, acronyms, and more. However, it is unclear exactly how
activity on this platform relates to larger conversations happening elsewhere
on the web, such as discussions on larger, more popular social media platforms.
In this research, we study the temporal activity trends on Urban Dictionary and
provide the first analysis of how this activity relates to content being
discussed on a major social network: Twitter. By collecting the whole of Urban
Dictionary, as well as a large sample of tweets over seven years, we explore
the connections between the words and phrases that are defined and searched for
on Urban Dictionary and the content that is talked about on Twitter. Through a
series of cross-correlation calculations, we identify cases in which Urban
Dictionary activity closely reflects the larger conversation happening on
Twitter. Then, we analyze the types of terms that have a stronger connection to
discussions on Twitter, finding that Urban Dictionary activity that is
positively correlated with Twitter is centered around terms related to memes,
popular public figures, and offline events. Finally, We explore the
relationship between periods of time when terms are trending on Twitter and the
corresponding activity on Urban Dictionary, revealing that new definitions are
more likely to be added to Urban Dictionary for terms that are currently
trending on Twitter.
