Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey admitted earlier this year that he couldn't quite define Twitter.
Maybe this will help: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary has announced that it will add "tweet" and "social media," in addition to more than 150 other new words.
Tweet (which is listed as both a noun and verb) is defined as "a chirp note" or "a post made on the Twitter online message service." One commenter on Merriam-Webster.com observed he was "glad to see the new definition for 'tweet' is less than 140 characters long."
The definition of "social media," which the dictionary lists as being used for the first time in 2004, reads:
Forms of electronic communication (as Web sites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (as videos)
Merriam-Webster's editor at large Peter Sokolowski explained the selection in a statement, noting "We've been tracking words like social media and tweet for years, of course, and now we feel their meanings have stabilized enough to include them in the dictionary."
Other terms that will find their way into Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary include "m-commerce," "crowdsourcing," "bromance," "cougar, and "fist bump."
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary was recently updated to include several other 21st century terms, such as "sexting" and "retweet"--neither of which have found their way into Merriam-Webster's College Dictionary. Facebook or "friend" (as in "friend someone on Facebook") also haven't made the cut.
What other new words do you think should be included in the dictionary? Weigh in below.