SayWhat App Combines Vine With Urban Dictionary To Assist Non-Native Speakers

16-year-old website Urban Dictionary has long served as a place where users can offer simplified definitions of complex slang terms and give creative names to all manner of unspeakably profane sex acts. Vine, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer to the web, have served up its signature six-second videos for just two-and-a-half years.

While these two platforms hail from different eras in the Internet’s history, a new app is combining them into a single amusing package. SayWhat, available on both the App Store and Google Play, invites its users to combine 10-second videos with crowdsourced definitions.

According to its website, SayWhat is intended as a tool for non-native speakers who want to understand some of the more intricate words and slang terms the English lexicon has to offer. Users who download the app will be asked to explain terms

like “throwing shade,” “salty,” and “Murica,” but they are not allowed to write out their definitions. Instead, they must record a ten-second video in which they act out the concept however they see fit. The app’s visual approach helps break down the language barrier, and it’s liable to produce some ridiculous results along the way.

It’s hard to imagine SayWhat evolving beyond a fun distraction, but Urban Dictionary has existed in the “fun distraction” space for a long time, and there’s surely space for a video version, too. So if you speak English (or Spanish or Mandarin, which the app also supports), get out there and start telling the world what “ratchet” means to you.