Etymologically people really do chat online.

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With social media developing on the internet more and more people are typing messages back and forth to each other in real time.

It’s been going on a while but with new ways to do it come new words for it.

If you use Twitter you post something called a tweet. The people who use Twitter are called tweeple.

In Facebook you post to someone’s wall but I haven’t yet seen wall used as a verb.

But Facebook, like other popular services, allows chat.

In these contexts chat means only one thing.

Although you can use Skype or another service to actually talk to others over the internet using our mouths and ears, and in some cases use webcams to actually see who we’re talking with, in the internet world chat means to type messages back and forth interactively.

People seem to like doing it and I’m told it’s because they can carry on multiple conversations at once. To that extent the traditional meaning of the word chat might still be applicable.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains the old meanings include “to utter familiarly; to talk in a gossiping way” and “to talk in a light and informal manner.”

Much of the live chat that goes on is certainly light and informal.

The word chat first appeared in English in the early 1400s as an abbreviation for chatter.

Chatter had, and still has, what the OED calls a more “depreciative” meaning than we assign to chat.

You can have a good chat with a friend but it’s those other people who are chattering about nothing in particular.

Chatter appeared in English back in the early 1200s and is said to be onomatopoeic.

As if anticipating Twitter 800 years ago the first meaning we have in the OED for chatter relates to birds uttering a rapid string of chirps.

It’s the rapid succession of sound that makes for chattering.

People not only chatter when talking in groups about juicy gossip but their teeth chatter when they are cold; making a quick series of clicks.

This teeth chattering appeared in the 1400s but it is why I said that participating in online chat is etymologically accurate. Typing as you live chat does make an ongoing quick series of clicks as you hammer away at the keyboard.

It was March 1985 that the OED points to as the emergence of the new meaning of chat. From the magazine Today’s Computers

“Chat, a mode [of computers connected as a Local Area Network] in which two or more users may type messages on each other’s terminals, enabling back-and-forth conversations through the network without waiting for electronic mail to be sent and received.”