In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Right Rhymes by Matt Kohl
  • Kyle Adams (bio)
The Right Rhymes by Matt Kohl. https://therightrhymes.com/. 2013–2021. Free of charge.

The Right Rhymes, an online historical dictionary of hip-hop, is—to use one of its own terms—dope (“adjective excellent; attractive; exciting”). User-friendly, sleek, and fun, it’s a rabbit-hole website, where devotees of hip-hop can get pleasantly lost tracing the historical and geographical contexts for familiar terms. Matt Kohl, the dictionary’s creator, has taken full advantage of the capabilities afforded to him by the online format. The website is thick and multidimensional, allowing for lateral exploration of terms and concepts in any number of directions. The Right Rhymes is incredibly ambitious, and compiling it would have seemed like an impossible task, but Kohl has done so remarkably well.

I’ll take the reader through my own exploration of the website. The landing page features the dictionary title in a hip-hop/graffiti-style font, underneath which are four clickable icons: a search icon, a lowercase “i” for information (the “about” page), and two slightly more inscrutable images—a bomb, which calls forth a dictionary entry at random (this turned out to be the most enjoyable aspect of the site), and a bar graph, which leads the user to a variety of statistics about entries, senses, places, and artists. It’s not immediately apparent, but one can also click on the title of the dictionary itself, which brings the user to an alphabetical index of links to headwords.1

I began by searching for crunk, a word I was sure would have a multifaceted treatment by the dictionary, and I was not disappointed.2 For this headword, as with other entries, The Right Rhymes gives the part of speech (adjective), the date on which the entry was published, and a number of senses (the first of which was “hyper, excited, enthused”).3 [End Page 226] Underneath the definitions are a series of buttons that allow users to contextualize the term along a variety of parameters. For crunk, these were

  • Categories: this gives the semantic field to which this specific term belongs; in this case, “accolades.” The category is a clickable link that brings the user to a list of all the other entries contained therein.

  • Collocates: this brings forth a list of terms that often appear alongside the searched term, along with superscript numbers indicating how many times the collocates appear together (crunk evidently appears three times with weed).

  • Etymology: this seems to have been gathered either from Kohl’s research (“some suggest a derivation from ‘crazy’ + ‘drunk’”), or from his own best guesses.

  • Synonyms: these have a fair amount of overlap with collocates, but also include links to other headwords.

  • Related concepts: This was my first stumbling block. Clicking on “related concepts” brought up a single word, geek, with no definition of its own, no link (geek is not one of the dictionary entries), and no rationale for its relation to crunk. I’ll return to this point below.

  • Timeline: One of the most impressive features of the site, this button brings the user to a scrollable timeline, with a “ruler” of years at the bottom, each divided into twelve segments, and chronological uses of the term popping up as flags planted at the relevant time. Each flag is clickable and brings up the line of lyrics in which the term was used, as well as the date, the artist, and the song title.

From the timeline, I could see that the use of crunk peaked twice; first, from late 2002 through mid-2004, then again from late 2005 through mid-2008. This matched my memory of hip-hop from those years, but I was surprised to learn that the earliest use of the term dated back to 1995, nearly a decade before I would have expected to see it.

Beneath the series of buttons, The Right Rhymes quotes the three earliest uses of the term, by date, artist, and song title, with a button beneath them that opens up all the other uses in chronological order (66 more examples, in the case of crunk). Finally, at the bottom...

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