MAKEUSEOF.com

Language is a constantly evolving creature that consistently steals words from other cultures, adapts itself to foreign tongues, and often shortens itself for easier use. However, with the advent of Twitter, we have an entirely new element of communication –hashtags.

Hashtags, a creation of Twitter, are keywords highlighted in a post utilizing the pound symbol (‘#’). These keywords are often used on a massive scale, leading to trending tweets which reveal the world’s hottest topics. That’s all well and good, but what happens if you don’t know what those hashtags mean?

Define Your Culture

In a similar fashion to Urban Dictionary and the Wiktionary, Tagdef offers itself as a web-tool with the sole purpose of defining our modern, rapidly-moving world. However, unlike its predecessors that focus primarily on current slang or clique-spurred jargon, this community-fueled publication takes on the challenge of defining trending tweets.

Here, you can find multiple definitions for the most viral trends in the world. Granted, the site is not moderated in any form or fashion, so your experience may give you as much intellectual wisdom as you would gain by just staring at a bathroom stall wall (which in many cases is actually a whole lot of wisdom). However, based on my personal usage of Tagdef, I have to say that it has a pretty solid set of definitions for a site that is user-based. Furthermore, it uses a Reddit-like voting system, so users can decide which definitions are the most accurate.

The site mainly serves as a search engine for Twitter hashtags, so there is a lack of a decent browsing feature. I remember that back in high school, I would sit around and look things up on Urban Dictionary, and Tagdef – which is an even more modern Urban Dictionary – could have done well by installing this function on their site. This does not take away from its usefulness, but it never hurts to add a bit of fun to everything.

A Real-Time World Glossary

Tagdef focuses on a flow of trending hashtags, so the homepage is always going to display the most current words that are on the tips of thumbs everywhere. Five categories are offered: Trending Tags, New Tags, Top Today, Top this Week, and All Time High. As you might guess, the site pulls these sets of trends directly from Twitter itself in an effort to encourage users to define them for the rest of the world. Furthermore, Tagdef provides cleanly-displayed trend statistics and graphs for all you number-crunchers out there.

Despite my dissatisfaction that #justinbieber is a common definition on the homepage (thank you to all the parents who gave smartphones to their daughters under the age of thirteen), the tool is a really cool way to keep up with what’s going on in the world. That being said, I would say that the definitions given are best described as leads for furthering your research on current events.

A Tagdef definition may give you a general idea of what is going on in the world, but using keywords found in definitions, you will get a general idea of the news that people are talking about. For instance, you may see an incredibly vague tag floating around, so just pop it into Tagdef, look up the definitions, and you’ll be treated with the latest current events written in layman’s terms. How would I have ever known that Bieber is “the most amazingest boy ever” without Tagdef?

Conclusion

Is Tagdef worth bookmarking? Absolutely. It’s a handy Twitter hashtag search tool for explaining things you might not understand on Twitter, and it is also a good way to prevent potential pop culture embarrassment in front of friends. Are you going to spend a lot of time using it? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a poor website – it just does what it’s supposed to do.

What other tools do you use to define Internet-lingo? Have you made use of Tagdef before?