What is Urban Dictionary and why are millennials suddenly searching their names on it?

Recently, an online trend of looking for names in the Urban Dictionary became viral across social media platforms, especially on Instagram and Twitter, when an Instagram user posted a story with the caption “Show us your name in the Urban Dictionary.” Right after this, millennials took to their social media handles and shared their names as shown in Urban Dictionary, turning it into an overnight sensation.  

What is Urban Dictionary? 
Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced dictionary that is more than two decades old. It was founded by Aaron Peckham in 1999, a computer science college fresher who wanted to challenge online word resources like Dictionary.com and Vocabulary.com as they were too conservative and excluded modern slang words and phrases, that suited his generation.  

What is the Urban Dictionary name searching trend all about? 
For so long, Urban Dictionary was used as glossary people referred to, when they needed to know the meanings of contemporary slangs. But now, social media users have taken it up it up by a few notches by initiating and participating in the trend of looking for the unique definitions of their names that they can’t find in their go-to Oxford English Dictionary. So, Urban Dictionary has suddenly emerged as the basic source of their names’ idiosyncratic definitions with people taking screenshots and sharing them widely across Instagram and Twitter. This was perhaps one of the biggest viral trends on social media for the year 2021 involving almost two billion people. 

How to find your name on Urban Dictionary? 
This trend became so popular overnight because it is too easy to follow. All you need to do is go to the official website of Urban Dictionary and type out your name on the search bar at the top of the home page. A drop-down page will appear with varied spellings, from which you’ll need to choose the correct spelling of your names. Once selected, it will automatically direct to the page containing the unique definition of the name searched. In case of popular names, there may be more than one definition, while uncommon names may just have one.