Word of the Day

: July 29, 2014

tweep

noun TWEEP

What It Means

: a person who uses the Twitter online message service to send and receive tweets

tweep in Context

"Rapper Snoop Dogg changed his name to Snoop Lion. Know how I found out? My tweeps told me." - Marc Munroe Dion, The Messenger (Madisonville, Kentucky), August 12, 2012

"More than two million people tweeted their elation and frustration during the game between Australia and Chile yesterday. A whopping 2,223,143 tweets were posted on Twitter as tweeps used the hashtag #CHIAUS during the 90-minute match." - The Advertiser (Australia), June 15, 2014

Did You Know?

Twitter and "tweeting" began in 2006, and two years later folks were referring to those who tweet as "tweeps." (The word "tweep" persisted despite a reproach by one blogger in 2008: "Do not post Good morning Twitter peeps! the second you wake up. Or some even more annoying variation like Yo Tweeps!") Today, the portmanteau "tweep" is easy to accept with the omnipresence of Twitter: it's a blend of Twitter's "tweet" and slang's "peeps." The slang use of "peeps" for "people" became common sometime around the mid-20th century. In a 1951 article in the Chicago Tribune, for example, it was reported that "high schoolers are greeting each other with 'Hi, peeps' (short for 'hello, people,' of course)."