‘Tweet,’ ‘Big Data’ & Other Marketing Terms Are Now Official Words

Hey marketers: a few of the words you and I use in our common speech are now official words.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has just announced its June 2013 update, and it includes several marketing/tech words that folks like us have been using for years. Here they are, in alphabetical order:

• big data
• crowdsourcing
• e-reader
• mouseover
• redirect
• stream (the verb, as in streaming content online)
• tweet

John Simpson, Chief Editor of the OED, points out that the dictionary is breaking its own rule by adding “tweet” to the dictionary:

The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on.

The folks at Geekwire point out that “retweet” was already added to the OED back in 2011 — proving what my mom and countless Language Arts teachers said a million times when I was a kid: The English language is strange.