Twitterese

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noun

The type of language used on Twitter.

Scrabble 13

Meanings

nounTwitterese (uncountable)
  1. uncountableThe type of language used on Twitter.

    On second look, the mainstream media resisted reporting the Anti-Theory story (~atoe in Twitterese) because it seemed so catastrophic.

    2019, Eric J. Adams, Cosmic Fever, Black Rose Writing, →ISBN, page 132
    5 more examples

    To learn Twitterese, review the tweets of other users to see how they’re condensing messages. Just remember to turn off Twitterese when you send an email to someone or compose a letter.

    2010, Jan Zimmerman, Doug Sahlin, Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies®, Wiley, →ISBN

    Responding to a woman I’ve never met who works in book publishing, I type in the language of 140-character Twitterese: “I want Mr. T GPS voice! How abt James Earl Jones? He says turn left you *turn* left. Or Norah Jones? Plaintive directions.”

    2013, Adam L. Penenberg, Play at Work: How Games Inspire Breakthrough Thinking, Portfolio, →ISBN

    The role of celebrity is to anchor a group (known in Twitterese as ‘followers’) into present-tense meaningfulness or future-facing conditions, which may be why newly minted celebrities are ever younger in the most prominent international popular-culture systems (Hollywood; music; social media).

    2014, John Hartley, Jason Potts, Cultural Science: A Natural History of Stories, Demes, Knowledge and Innovation, Bloomsbury Academic, published 2016, →ISBN, page 86

    We might say that moving through all three languages from Shakespeare to Twitterese involves imaginatively going beyond the givens, creating a startling and novel declaration: “horses go all cannibal . . .”

    2016, John Barell, Moving from What to What If?: Teaching Critical Thinking with Authentic Inquiry and Assessments, Routledge, →ISBN

    Based on the internet linguistics research (cf. Crystal 2006, 2008), we propose a unitary analysis of “paralinguistic devices” such as hashtags and punctuation devices found in Twitterese which ascribe “tonal colouring” to utterances, serving to express humour, sarcasm, irony, and self-deprecation.

    2018, Ewelina Prażmo, “Twitterati in the Twitterverse: A Cognitive Linguistics Account of Hashtags on Twitter”, in Rafał Augustyn, Agnieszka Mierzwińska-Hajnos, editors, New Insights into the Language and Cognition Interface, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, →ISBN, part three (Multimodality in Language Processing), page 118

    Synonyms: Twitterish, Twitterspeak

Synonyms & antonyms

nounThe type of language used on Twitter.

Origin

Cite this entry
APA

Twitterese. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Twitterese

MLA

“Twitterese.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Twitterese. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Twitterese,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Twitterese.

Source: Twitterese on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.