Tweeting

How to spell tweeting

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tweeting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tweeting mean?

1. verbMaking the short, high chirping calls of a small bird.
2. verbPosting a short public message on a social media platform.

Tweeting in a sentence

• The sparrows were tweeting in the hedge as the sun came up.

• She spent the whole conference tweeting updates from the back of the hall.

• A robin kept tweeting outside the kitchen window all morning.

• The company kept tweeting about the product launch all afternoon.

Where does tweeting come from?

Language of origin: Other

The base word 'tweet' is imitative, coined in English in the early nineteenth century to echo the short, high call of a small bird; spelling it with a double 'e' captures that thin, sustained chirp. The form 'tweeting' simply adds the present participle ending '-ing' to describe the act in progress. For most of its life the word stayed firmly in the world of songbirds, but in 2006 the social platform Twitter borrowed the bird metaphor for its short posts, and within a few years 'tweeting' had gained a thriving second sense meaning to publish a brief message online. The two readings sit side by side today, one literal and one digital, both spelled identically. Because the word is built so transparently from an everyday root plus '-ing', it carries no real spelling trap beyond remembering the doubled 'e'.

How the word is built

• tweet (imitative of a bird's call)
• -ing (present participle suffix)