Tweet

How to spell tweet

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tweet

What does tweet mean?

1. nounA short, high-pitched sound made by a small bird.
2. verbTo make the short, high-pitched sound of a small bird.
3. nounA short message posted publicly on a social media platform.

Tweet in a sentence

• noun

  The faint tweet of a sparrow carried across the garden at dawn.

• verb

  The robins would tweet loudly outside the bedroom window each morning.

• noun

  The company apologised for an offensive tweet posted by an employee.

• noun

  Every tweet from the nest told her the chicks were still hungry.

• verb

  At first light the finches began to tweet in the hedge.

• noun

  Her tweet about the delayed train was shared thousands of times.

Where does tweet come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Tweet began life in the early 1800s as a piece of pure sound imitation, an attempt to spell out the short, high call of a small bird. English has a long habit of inventing words this way, and tweet sits beside relatives such as twitter and chirp, all of them shaped to echo the noises birds actually make. The doubled vowel in the middle simply stretches the sound to match the thin, drawn-out note of the call, which is the main thing a writer needs to remember about its spelling. For almost two centuries it stayed firmly tied to birdsong. Then, after the launch of the social media service Twitter in 2006, tweet was rapidly repurposed for a short online message, and that newer sense quickly became the one most adults use every day.

How the word is built

• tweet (imitative of the high, thin sound a small bird makes); a single onomatopoeic root with no prefix or suffix