tweet

plural tweets

1. The sound of a bird; any short high-pitched sound or whistle.

   [Ignatz, dropping Officer Pupp's police whistle into the lake:] The fishes will have lots of fun tweeting tweets on it.

   1934 April 7, George Herriman, Krazy Kat, Saturday, comic strip, →ISBN, page 104

2. social mediaAn entry posted on the microblogging service Twitter.First known use since 2007

   A tweet can be received via SMS to your cell phone […]

   2008, Chris Seibold, Big Book of Apple Hacks

   2 more examples

   Every few seconds, a tweet appears and vanishes somewhere on the globe.

   2007 April 22, Jason Pontin, “Twitter takes instant messaging to an extreme”, in International Herald-Tribune

   For example, as you edit a tweet in Twitter, the number of characters left is updated as you type.

   2008, Wendy Chisholm, Matthew May, Universal Design for Web Applications

3. broadlysocial mediaAn entry on any microblogging service.

   He was watching the media coverage, talking to his lawyers. And we saw that because of his tweets on Truth Social, or his posts on Truth Social.

   2023 August 3, Kristen Holmes, The Lead with Jake Tapper, CNN

present singular third person tweets · participle present tweeting · participle past tweeted · past tweeted

1. intransitiveTo produce a short high-pitched sound, similar to that of certain birds.

   [Ignatz, dropping Officer Pupp's police whistle into the lake:] The fishes will have lots of fun tweeting tweets on it.

   1934 April 7, George Herriman, Krazy Kat, Saturday, comic strip, →ISBN, page 104

2. ambitransitivesocial mediaTo post an entry to Twitter.First known use since 2007

   =Mr Trump tweeted: "Big day planned on national security tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!"

   2017 January 25, “Donald Trump: 'We will build Mexico border wall'”, in BBC World Service, retrieved 25 Jan 2017

   2 more examples

   In Saudi Arabia, one of the most conservative societies, one online rebel has rocked the Islamic establishment with tweeted allegations of corruption within the ruling royal family.

   2012 April 19, Josh Halliday, “Free speech haven or lawless cesspool – can the internet be civilised?”, in The Guardian

   First, an apology. Tweet in haste and repent at leisure. When I first heard about the idea, before I had properly examined it, I actually tweeted that this was [a] welcome 'innovation' from a state-controlled train operator.

   2024 February 7, Christian Wolmar, “LNER's crazy idea will price more people off the railway”, in RAIL, number 1002, page 44

3. ambitransitivebroadlysocial mediaTo post an entry to any microblogging site.

   In response to the motion, Trump tweeted on Truth Social

   2023 September 17, Lou Kettering, “Federal prosecutors in DC 2020 election interference case request order to prohibit Trump making ‘inflammatory’ and ‘misleading’ statements”, in Jurist

   1 more example

   As Georgetown public policy prof Dan Moynihan tweeted on Bluesky yesterday, the editors of the Times “are not falling for [Rufo’s] game, they are co-producing it.”

   2024 April 17, Doktor Zoom, “New York Times Joins Chris Rufo In Mean Girls Finger-Snapping At NPR CEO”, in Wonkette

1. used to represent the sound of a bird twittering: twit.

   I've got two loves / And they go tweet (×9) like little birds

   1977, David Byrne, “Love → Building On Fire”, in Talking Heads: 77, performed by Talking Heads

plural Tweets

1. A surname.

plural Tweets

1. Alternative letter-case form of tweet (“Twitter post”).

   The 34-year-old Fallon has also become a prolific Twitterer (yes, it really is him sending Tweets from his iPhone).

   2009 March 2, Kevin Pang, “@JimmyFallon wants you to follow him”, in Chicago Tribune, 162nd year, number 61, section 3, page 1

   5 more examples

   Twitter allows users, called Twitterers, to stay constantly connected with friends and family by sending and receiving messages short messages called Tweets.[…]Write a short story in the maximum length of a Tweet.

   2008 May 31, Jessica Guynn, “Contest inspires few words”, in Los Angeles Times, page C3

   Julia Thompson will be sending out news Tweets ([…]) and I’ll be keeping you updated with cool calendar Tweets ([…]).

   2008 August 15, Lyssa Oberkreser, “Tweets have got her all a-Twitter”, in Tallahassee Democrat, 103rd year, number 228, page 3B

   Twitter, if you’re not familiar with it, is a form of micro-blogging, which allows users to send very short updates on what they’re doing to anyone interested to receive them and last week several “Tweets” – as the Twitter postings are called – started appearing in the BBC’s coverage.[…]Given that several “Tweets” instructively contradicted the official line on what was happening you might argue that this enlistment of an army of virtual stringers improved the BBC’s coverage. But that argument wouldn’t take account of the subtle alteration of trust that takes place when you read coverage that cuts and pastes random “Tweets” alongside more conventional forms of BBC journalism.

   2008 December 2, Tom Sutcliffe, “Twittering on is not the way to provide news”, in The Independent, number 6,906, page 31

   So it makes sense that just over a year and countless Tweets later, the pair tied the knot last week in a 15-hour extravaganza that was chock-full of spontaneous Tweets not only by the bride and groom, but guests both in-person and on the Web.

   2009 March 15, Corilyn Shropshire, “Twitter: When is it too much?”, in The Marshall News Messenger, volume 131, number 287, page 2B

   I don’t doubt the time- and hassle-saving example, but my guess is that for every one of those there are 999 Tweets about going to the mall or going to see friends or going to see friends at the mall.[…]Twitterers join lists of people they want to follow (not my word, but I like it), and if they follow 15 people who send out five Tweets each, that’s a lot of techno-sludge to wade through every day.[…]Most of the politicians who aren’t boring are offensive, and any journalist who can tell a story in 140 characters—that’s the maximum Tweet length—isn’t writing about anything that interests me.

   2009 March 25, Jack Cowan, “Not falling for Twitter mania”, in San Angelo Standard-Times, page A4

present singular third person Tweets · participle present Tweeting · participle past Tweeted · past Tweeted

1. Alternative letter-case form of tweet (“to post on Twitter”).

   Girls want pictures with him; guys dress like him for Halloween; more than 500 people “Tweet” his whereabouts on the social networking Web site.

   2009 April 1, Ofelia Casillas, “All a-Twitter over ‘Tamale Guy’”, in Chicago Tribune, section 4, page 1, column 2

   5 more examples

   His comment galvanized fiscally conservative Democrats to support the president’s bill and heightened the sense of despondency among those Republican congressmen and senators who BBMed and Tweeted on their BlackBerries throughout the speech.

   2009 September 11, Clay A. Dumas, “So You Think You Can Shout”, in The Harvard Crimson, archived from the original on 05 Aug 2013

   He [Brandon Marshall] also Tweeted that he would earmark $1 million to mental-health research, which is significant to Marshall, having been diagnosed in 2012 with borderline-personality disorder.

   2014 May 20, “Overtime: The lighter side”, in Santa Barbara News-Press, Santa Barbara, Calif., →OCLC, page C2, column 2

   “I cannot tell you how many times I have Instagrammed or Tweeted a piece that I am going to use on one of the characters on the show, and fans of the show are just yearning for it,” say Lane.

   2017, Wendy K. Bendoni, Social Media for Fashion Marketing: Storytelling in a Digital World, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, →ISBN, page 209

   Corinthia’s bathroom was never discussed with the Lugo Memorial student body, but when it (the bathroom) materialized, it was Facebooked, Instagrammed, Tweeted, Foursquared, WordPressed, Tumblred, Snapchatted, and so thoroughly digitally disseminated that it was as if pictures of Rinna Buss’s breasts had been leaked.

   2018, Adam Rapp, chapter 1, in Fum, Candlewick Press, →ISBN, page 21

   People who live here pride themselves on being off the grid—a feat increasingly impossible in today’s always-Instagrammed, shared, Tweeted, GPS-mapped world.

   2020, Shannon Takaoka, Everything I Thought I Knew, Candlewick Press, →ISBN, page 250