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Tweet accepted as official word by Oxford English Dictionary

Slyvia June 18, 2013 Channel

Twitter and Facebook have been spearheading social networking growth over the years and the ‘tweet' phrase phenomenon has been accepted by official language sources.  UK Prime Minister David Cameron will not be happy as he aired his feelings about Twitter in a 2009 radio interview. At the time he said ‘The trouble with Twitter, the instantness of it – too many twits might make a t***.”

The powers that be behind the Oxford English Dictionary have accepted ‘tweet', and not just in relation to a bird song. Bizarrely ‘retweet' was included in a 2011 edition.

There are 340 tweets posted every day with even the Pope having his own Twitter feed. We haven't seen him discussing his lunch yet, but he has chatted about various topics this year to his many followers.

Twitter: A success story, but how much of the content is actually worth reading?
Twitter: A social networking success story, but how much of the content is actually worth reading?

Tweet is only one of a number of technology words that look to be appearing in the June 2013 Edition. Others such as e-reader, crowdsourcing, big data, mouseover and stream (the verb) and redirect (the noun) will be making an appearance.

‘To have a cow' is apparently also appearing in the latest edition. This was linked to Bart Simpson, from the cartoon series ‘The Simpsons', but the phrase is said to date back to 1959.

Twitter has over 500 million registered users and 340 million tweets are posted daily with Twitter handling more than 1.6 billion search queries in the same time period. It is one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet.

Pop culture is prevalent on Twitter, with many of the top 10 accounts related directly to pop stars.

  1. Justin Bieber – 40,527,096 followers
  2. Lady Gaga – 38,313,777 followers
  3. Katy Perry – 37,924,271 followers
  4. Barack Obama – 32,819,023 followers
  5. Rihanna – 30,041,865 followers
  6. Taylor Swift – 29,302,825 followers
  7. YouTube – 29,137,313 followers
  8. Britney Spears – 28,133,826 followers
  9. Justin Timberlake – 21,564,556 followers
  10. Instagram – 21,384,076 followers

Kitguru says: Too many twits make a t*** – the infamous words of UK Prime Minister David Cameron. I can't help but agree.

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