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Chinglish goes viral

( CRI ) Updated: 2014-05-29 09:37:12

The 2013 Chinese buzzword "no zuo no die" has also been included in the online urban dictionary with the explanation, "this phrase is of Chinglish origin." The expression means if you don't do stupid things, they won't come back to haunt you.

Submissions by users are approved by volunteer editors, and new words or phrases can only be published with approval from more than half of the editors. Other Chinglish words or phrases in the dictionary include "gelivable" (awesome or amazing), "people mountain people sea" (very crowded) as well as several other Chinese expressions.

Zhang Meilan is a Chinese Language and Literature professor at Tsinghua University. She discussed her views of Chinglish.

"Chinglish can not be described as something good or something bad. Chinglish is storage of a mixture of languages. As Experts in the field of linguistics, we use Chinglish when researching about the development of languages. The increasing amount of foreigners that travel China for business or for educational purposes also means that Chinglish still has a distinctive purpose."

The Urban Dictionary is a Web-based dictionary that contains more than seven million definitions. Submissions are regulated by volunteer editors and rated by site visitors. The Urban Dictionary offers literal definitions and descriptions of international urban terms. Each definition is automatically accepted or rejected based on the number of "Publish" or "Don't Publish" votes it receives by editors. Editors are comprised of public volunteers. There are no criteria that editors have to follow in approving or rejecting definitions.

The Urban Dictionary website was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham. Peckham created the site during his freshman year at California Plytechnic State University. Peckam is not the first person to create an internet hit during his time at University, Google and Facebook were originally made by a pair of Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The popular search Engine Yahoo was also made by two Stanford students, Jerry Yang and David Filo.