tweet

 
Pronunciation: /twiːt/

noun

  • 1the chirp of a small or young bird: the gentle tweet of a bird can be heard
  • 2a posting made on the social networking service Twitter: he started posting tweets via his mobile phone to let his parents know he was safe

verb

[no object]
  • 1make a chirping noise: the birds were tweeting in the branches
  • 2make a posting on the social networking service Twitter: it’s easy to tweet all the time

Origin:

mid 19th century: imitative

Word Trends

Once invoking nothing beyond the sound of birds gently chirping, tweet is a striking example of the Internet’s influence on language trends. Since the social networking service Twitter was set up in 2006, ‘tweeting’ has become so popular that the frequency of the noun tweet in the Oxford English Corpus has risen tenfold. The millions of people using Twitter may take themselves and their tweets very seriously, but the site’s name suggests otherwise: the Corpus shows that the majority of uses of twitter in the sense ‘talk rapidly and at length’ imply foolishness or triviality: two posh English girls twitter incessantly twittering on about the good old days