Twitter is emerging as a major source of quotation evidence for the Oxford English Dictionary. In the revisions and additions made to OED3 in 2018, it was the seventh most cited source. In 2019, it was the second most cited source, with 501 quotations, rivaling the Times (of London), with 560, and clobbering the Times (of NY), which was #3 at 366. In all there were 1,022 tweets cited by OED at the end of 2019 (80% of which were added in 2018 and 2019), and I see OED.com has the number now up to 1,269, so they’re on pace for another big tweet-quoting year.
Almost all of the OED’s current major sources are newspapers and other periodicals, and one can see why, in the age of digitized media archives: these sources produce a lot of words, all of which are searchable, sometimes stretching back hundreds of years (in the case of the Times, e.g.).
Twitter only goes back to 2006, but it has the same scale and searchability advantages as these publications (evidently OED maintains its own twitter archive, as many of the accounts it cites have now been deleted), plus the added advantage of capturing an additional register. Among the lemmas illustrated by tweets are: Read More