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‘Tweet’ now an official word in the Oxford English Dictionary

Tweet has officially been recognized as a word in the June 2013 Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

artImg198x166_15086The word ‘tweet’ has been officially recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary and the dictionary has even broken its rule that a new word has to be in use for at least ten years before addition in the lexicon.

“The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED,” John Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary, said.

“This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on,” Simpson said.

The word ‘Tweet’ was earlier added in the dictionary in relation to bird song. In the June 2013 Edition it has found an additional official definition. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word “tweet” is defined as “a posting made on the social networking service Twitter” and as a verb, it is defined as “to post on Twitter.” Some other technology words that enter the Oxford English June 2013 edition are big data, crowdsourcing, e-reader, mouseover, redirect (the noun), and stream (the verb).

Twitter is an online social media site which has more than 340 million tweets posted daily and handles more than 1.6 billion search queries every day. The tweets are generally 140 characters long. Nearly all popular icons like presidents, movies stars, pop stars, sport stars, Dalai Lama and even the Pope have Twitter feeds.