A review of the
Alternative Spanish Dictionary

"Slang, profanities, insults, and vulgarisms from around the world" to describe what the site is all about.

There are about 160 different language dictionaries (everything from Apache to Zulu) listed on the site, along with corresponding translations. These dictionaries together contain nearly 3,000 terms along with their corresponding English translation(s), so as you can probably guess, the dictionary is pretty popular with those learning a language (since it seems that most people who learn a language are first interested in how to say the "bad words."

At least that's how it was in my high school Spanish class.

As with any other online dictionary reference, there are both some positives and negatives about the site. I'll start out with the negative (in order to end on a positive note).

The Bad

The site seems to have started out with very good intentions collecting user-submitted words along with their definitions and then posting them in the corresponding language dictionary. However, it seems that now there is no way for users to add updated terms. The FAQs promise an input method to be up and running, but the last update to the page seems to have happened a year and a half ago (June 2004), so I doubt that the input system will be up any time soon. There is, however, an email address on the site through which minor edits can be made, but I don't know if the email address is good.

Well, I just checked the site again to see if any updates had been made to how users could submit candidate entries to the dictionaries. It seems like there was a new system being tested in 2008, along with some other new features, like a new look, but the input system still hasn't been added to the dictionary pages. So it still doesn't look like this is going to change or be updated anytime in the near future.

Along with there not being an input system is the fact that slang changes rather quickly when compared to other types of language. Because there is no input system, there is no way to know how current the slang is that you're looking at. It might have been used five years ago, but it could mean something entirely different today. There is no way to know by just looking at the dictionary entries.

Below is an example entry from the Alternative Spanish Dictionary.

Another negative with the Alternative Spanish Dictionary site is that there are only 2743 terms for 162 separate languages. That comes out to an average of only about 17 words per language, which is not all that extensive. However, to be fair, the Alternative Spanish dictionary has just over 170 terms, while the Alternative Mexican Spanish section has a little under 140 terms.

A final criticism with the Alternative Spanish Dictionary is that because the dictionary seems to have at one point been populated by user-submitted terms, there is some duplication of words and their definitions.

Enough of that. Now...

The Good

First of all, because the Alternative Spanish dictionary only deals with "bad language" the vocabulary is somewhat specialized (if you consider profanity and vulgarity to be a specialized topic). This is nice because you know exactly what kind of words and definitions will be in the dictionary.

Second, the layout is easy to navigate. You choose the language on the bottom of the homepage and after you get to the language dictionary you want, you click on a word and it goes right to a list of all the words in the dictionary (there can be multiple pages if there are numerous terms).

Another positive is that each definition contains useful information including the part of speech, the definition, and a notes section with different information, such as the literal meaning of the word, where the word is used, pronunciation, etc.In addition, each language is listed as part of a language tree, so you can see how related a certain language is to another language. This is interesting if you're in to historical-type linguistics, but if not, you'd probably do without the language families pages.

Finally, the editor has made .pdf documents available for each language dictionary, including the Alternative Spanish Dictionary. You can either download each individual dictionary or download all the dictionaries in one .pdf document of 131 pages.

The Overall Rating

Overall, I give the Alternative Spanish Dictionaries site 2 out of 5 stars, just because it seems to have been pushed aside and is no longer maintained. However, I give the Alternative Spanish Dictionary 3 out of 5 stars because there is a decent collection of terms and definitions for the Spanish language.

I would hope that sometime in the future the Alternative Spanish Dictionary user-submission process could be reinstated to allow for the creation of a more robust Spanish slang dictionary. However, the creator of the site indicated that abuse by submitters caused him to rethink his method of allowing users to freely submit words and definitions, so this process would have to be improved before user submissions could be accepted again.

But be sure to check out the Alternative Spanish Dictionary for yourself, especially if you're interested in learning some Spanish slang terms.