OED vs. UD

Merry Bridgeman
Comparing Authorities: OED vs. UD
Dr. Hughes

Everyday our society comes up with more and more words. Sometimes these words are stolen from the past and given a new meaning or created to fit something that has just been invented. Most of these new words or meanings can usually be somewhat insulting. Faggot, for example, is a word that has much controversy. This word has the power to be very demeaning and rude. With the word, faggot, one can see how over time society changed a words meaning to something totally different.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives several meaning for the word faggot. Some of these definitions include “A bundle of sticks, twigs, or small branches of trees bound together and the practice of burning heretics alive.” It even includes the slang definition which we are more familiar with, “a (male) homosexual.” People, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, have been using this word to refer to male homosexuals since around 1941. Even though this word has two different meanings, society tends to use the more discriminatory definition in everyday vocabulary. Urban dictionary is a little more contemporary in the fact that anyone can post a new word or a new definition that they themselves created. For this reason I find this website to be less credible then the Oxford English Dictionary. However, Urban Dictionary did contain both definitions for the word faggot.
There are always going to be some new words that magically appear out of nowhere. Words such as google, blog, and email were not even thought about in the 1950s, but they have become common, household names. Urban Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary can both be extremely helpful resources. However, I believe that the Oxford English Dictionary would be more helpful when looking up words for a paper or school projects. This dictionary is what I would consider to be prescriptive due to the fact that authorities do check over the content to make sure it is correct. On Urban Dictionary, anyone is free to write what they feel a word means and after reading some of their definitions you realize not all of them are correct. This is why I believe it to be a descriptive resource. Not to put Urban Dictionary down because I have used it myself and found it to be very informative, but it probably is not the most reliable source of information.