‘Tweet’ – to post a message to Twitter – has been included in the hallowed pages of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Although the word ‘tweet’ is already in the OED in relation to bird song, it now has an additional official definition in the June 2013 edition.
‘Tweet’, as relating to micro-blogging site Twitter, is now an official word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, although oddly ‘retweet’ (sharing another’s tweet) was included in 2011
Look the other way: Twitter is so popular editors of the OED broke their ten-year rule to include it in the June 2013 edition
Twitter is an online phenomenon, with 340 million tweets posted every day. Even the Pope, known as the voice of God, and the Dalai Lama have Twitter feeds.
Because Twitter has become such an important part of daily life in such a short space of time, the dictionary’s editors were willing to bend their own rules to include ‘tweet’ in the OED, the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language.
John Simpson, chief editor, said: ‘The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED.
‘This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion.’
He added: ‘But it seems to be catching on.
TOP TEN TWITTER USERS
Justin Bieber – 40,527,096 followers
Lady Gaga – 38,313,777 followers
Katy Perry – 37,924,271 followers
Barack Obama – 32,819,023 followers
Rihanna – 30,041,865 followers
Taylor Swift – 29,302,825 followers
YouTube – 29,137,313 followers
Britney Spears – 28,133,826 followers
Justin Timberlake – 21,564,556 followers
Instagram – 21,384,076 followers
TWITTER – A PHENOMENON IN 140 WORDS OR LESS
Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as ‘tweets’.
Twitter was launched in July 2006 by entrepreneur Jack Dorsey and rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 500 million registered users as of 2012.
Roughly 340 million tweets are posted daily and Twitter handles more than 1.6 billion search queries per day.
Since its launch, Twitter has become one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet.
It is based in San Francisco.
In December Pope Benedict XVI, using the papal account ‘Pontifex’, sent his first tweet. It read: ‘Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.’
source:::::mailonline.com
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