4,000 Years of Chinese Culture Culminates in this Online Slang Dictionary

So now we’ve figured out that the internet won’t bring universal freedoms to China and got all that disappointment out of our systems, perhaps it can at least bring some lulz. A startup site called Xinci.so wants to help people figure out all the Chinese slang and faddish humor that pervades the web, which often resembles some sort of hyperconnected playground of childish insider gags.

Xinci – which could be translated as “new dictionary” – is basically a version of UrbanDictionary, packed full of user-submitted Chinese slang terms. So far it has 4,000 entries, which is a bit short of UD’s seven million English terms, but it’s a start.

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If Xinci can gather a devoted clique of regular uploaders, then the site should become the go-to place for the web’s wisecracks. For those baffled by all the slang, Xinci can inform you that “3Q” is a jokey way of saying “thank you” in Chinese (say it “san q”), or that “cai niao” is a “noob”, especially referring to a newcomer on the web. Though if that needs explaining to you, then you’re the noob, obviously.

With UrbanDictionary getting such huge traffic – 15 million visits a month – it might not be a bonehead move to make such a silly site. Xinci’s founder is Jason Gui from mainland China, who’s a graduate of Penn, an Ivy League school, so he’ll have a business plan in mind. Indeed, he told Chinese tech blog 36Kr yesterday that it’s a serious project for him, and he’ll soon start to monetize it. For now, Xinci has no ads and is available in both simplified and traditional Chinese versions, with an English iteration promised.

(Source: 36Kr – article in Chinese)