BREAK through the confusion with our top jargon busters.

@ A command to designate a reply to another tweet.

Example: @edvarcl Whatcha doing now?

# Hex tags are collaborative social tags used to categorise an event or theme and make it easily searchable. You can create your own, too.

Example: #XYZ for tweets related to whatever hot topic you choose.

Direct tweet An e-mail message of sorts on Twitter in which your tweet can be seen only by the sender and the recipient.

You can send direct messages only to your followers.

Follow By following, you choose to see the user's tweets on your timeline.

Followers Twitter users, also known as tweeter-ers, following your posts.

Mistweet A tweet that you will live to regret, such as a dweet - an update made when you were drunk.

Protected profiles You see these every now and then.

There are private profiles which you can see only if they allow you to follow them.

Reportwitters Journalists who post real-time news tweets in conjunction with their articles.

RT or retweet A tweet that is repeated when someone thinks it is important.

Designate a retweet by adding "RT" in front of it.

Proper etiquette requires you to append the original source of the repeated tweet.

Example: RT @singapore_news: Netizens flame first H1N1 victim http://sn.im/iyz7g

Short URLS Mini URLs that act as a redirect to longer URLs in order to maximise your message space.

Popular services include tinyurl.com and bit.ly.

Timeline A display of all messages posted by people you follow as well as your own, arranged in descending chronological order.

TweetIn When twitterers plan to chatter at a preset time.

Twitterati A-list twitterers with a strong fan base.

Find them at followfamous.com and celebritytweet.com.

Twitterrhea Also known as tweet spam.

Describes the act of sending many tweets at one go.

Twitterzine A magazine that is published on Twitter.

Used mostly by literary types.

Example: @tweetthemeat (horror fiction) and @nanoism (literary zine)

Twoosh It is the Scrabble bingo equivalent of the Twitter world.

Describes a tweet that maximises the 140 characters limit.

By Edvarcl Heng

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

For more The Straits Times stories, click here.