There are a lot of odd acronyms floating around Twitter. Apart from urban slang, and weird Web 2.0 website names (i.e. Squidoo, Kirtsy), there are “hashtags.”

A hashtag is a word or set of words with a “#” in front of it. This was originally designed so that when you are looking for a specific topic on the Twitter search engine ,  it was possible to find quickly. An example of this is the place name “San Diego”. If you look it up without a hashtag, you get everything with those keywords including source material (names of publications) showing up. With the # in front, #sandiego, you can get the exact subject you are looking for.

Of course, this assumes that everyone on Twitter remembers to use the hashtag. Many do not, and others make up their own hashtags as they are writing their tweets. So, in order to figure out what peeps are talking about, I recommend using the site What The Hashtag? .

This website gives you the trending hashtags, active tags, and a word cloud of tag categories. It is free to create an account, and they now have a set of tools that can help you figure out the odder tags.

There are also a lot of chatspeak acronyms that show up in Twitter. Many of these were originally used in chatrooms, and then in text messages  (SMS) on mobile phones.

I would also recommend the Twittonary as a place to look up Twitter words.