From an Announcement (5 pages; PDF)

Here’s something to get the twitterati tweeting: dictionary experts at Oxford University Press (OUP) have been monitoring 1.5 million tweets this year to explore the impact of the Twitter phenomenon on the English language.

Applying the cutting-edge technology used for gathering data in OUP’s two-billion-word Oxford English Corpus, lexicographers are able to track changes in the language across a wide variety of media including newspapers, magazines, blogs – and now Twitter.

See Also: Twitter Facts (3 pages; PDF)

The Oxford English Corpus contains almost 1.5 million tweets, randomly selected from all public tweets between January and April 2009

BASIC NUMBERS
Total tweets = 1,496,981
Total sentences = 2,098,630
Total words = 22,431,033
Average words per tweet = 14.98
Average sentences per tweet = 1.40
Average words per sentence in Twitter= 10.69
Average words per sentence in general usage = 22.09

Source: Oxford English Dictionary

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