A Twitter Lexicon

Twitter is my favorite microblogging service. There are many, many glossaries of Twitter vocabulary on the web. So many, in fact, it’s almost overwhelming to a newbie to Twitter.

Let’s come up with the top 10 words that someone new to Twitter should know. Here are eight that I came up with quickly. Can you help round out the list?

  1. Tweet: Your 140-character (or shorter) message
  2. Twittering: The act of sending your tweet
  3. Followers: People who receive your tweets
  4. Retweet: Forwarding a tweet to your followers
  5. @ : The symbol that precedes the name of a person you’re replying to
  6. Tweep: Someone you know on Twitter
  7. Tweeple: See “tweep”
  8. Twoops: Accidentally sending a direct (private) message publicly

(And if you’re wondering “what’s Twitter?” see the clear and concise description from Common Craft, the company that specializes in explaining complex things in plain English.)


This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 8:25 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “A Twitter Lexicon”

  1. Matt Singley Says:
    August 1st, 2008 at 9:55 am

    The lingo that I get asked about the very most is actually old computer geek stuff. So these aren’t Twitter specific, but I don’t think I got for more than a couple of days until I see somebody ask me directly (or the Twitter community at large) what they mean.

    w00t: Those aren’t ohs, those are zeros. That is an old gaming term that could have a couple of meanings, but it’s generally accepted as “we own the other team”. It used to be a victory cry after playing games with people online. Now it’s a more generic term often used for something that is really great.

    FTW: “for the win”. There are some other more vulgar representations, but this is what most people refer to it as. A nice nod to game shows, and another exclamation of joy or victory.

    noob: Same as newbie. You used that to start your post. :)

  2. Karen Russell Says:
    August 1st, 2008 at 6:48 pm

    Twam, twammer, twamming — Twitter spam. As in, don’t do it. :-P

  3. Lara Kretler Says:
    August 1st, 2008 at 8:29 pm

    I’ve gotten asked about emoticons a lot - the smileys that some Twitter folks use to punctuate their Tweets and add a bit more emotional depth to the flat text. Also, Summize is a key Twitter term for searching conversation threads and keywords on http://www.summize.com, especially when Twitter Replies aren’t showing up.

  4. Adam Cohen Says:
    August 14th, 2008 at 8:31 am

    Great list - here are two more:
    Tweetup: A gathering scheduled by using Twitter to communicate to attendees
    Tmeet: To meet someone in person for the first time, who you previously only knew through Twitter (I’ve been trying -in a fun way- for awhile to come up with that term, and explained it more here: http://adamcohen.typepad.com/adamsblog/2008/08/a-suggestion-for-the-twitter-lexicon.html )
    Thanks!
    Adam

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