@ing in the #OED: Twitter/X as Citation Evidence in the Oxford English Dictionary , 2018–2025

Abstract Between 2018 and 2025, the social media platform Twitter, and its successor X, emerged as the most important source of language evidence in updates and revisions to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). At the start of 2026, Twitter/X accounted for over 5,200 evidentiary quotations in the dictionary, including first evidence for 213 new words and senses. Based on detailed analysis of the underlying XML-encoded data of several historical iterations of the OED published between 2017 and the present, this article studies the dictionary’s recent turn towards Twitter/X as a major source of lexical evidence in updates to the OED since 2018, for words and senses both new and old, remarkable and un-. It begins with brief history of the OED’s incorporation of Twitter/X evidence over the last decade, noting ways in which that evidence differs from that of other major sources; then it discusses particularities of the Twitter/X corpus and factors affecting its suitability as evidence in historical lexicography; and finally it discusses some of the unique aspects of new and current English that Twitter/X has allowed the OED to document, before offering some concluding caveats.