ریتویت کردن

What it means

ریتویت کردن (retweet-kardan) means to retweet, to share a tweet to your own followers on X (formerly Twitter). The verb is colloquial, used constantly by Iranian Twitter, and it has stuck even after Elon Musk’s 2023 rebrand of Twitter to X and the renaming of “retweet” to “repost.”

Iranian users still say ریتویت کردن. The English replacement “repost” never took hold in Persian internet speech, and the Pure Persian alternative “بازنشر” (bāznashr, republication) exists only in formal contexts. The frozen brand-name verb survived its own brand.

Compound verb structure

ریتویت کردن follows the standard pattern: English-rooted noun (ریتویت) plus the Persian light verb کردن (kardan, to do). The English ri- prefix gets transliterated and absorbed wholesale into the noun. Persian does not try to translate “re-” the way it sometimes translates “un-” (آن); it just takes the whole word.

• Present: من ریتویت می‌کنم (man retweet mikonam), تو ریتویت می‌کنی (to retweet mikoni)
• Past: ریتویتش کردم (retweet-esh kardam, I retweeted it)
• Subjunctive: که ریتویت کنم (ke retweet konam)
• Negation: ریتویت نکردم (retweet nakardam, I did not retweet)

The object pronoun clitic attaches to the noun, the colloquial pattern across all the foreign-rooted internet verbs in Persian.

Why retweet stayed

Iranian Twitter is one of the most active Persian-language internet spaces, and it became politically central during the 2009 Green Movement, the 2017-2018 protests, and the 2022 Mahsa Amini uprising. The word ریتویت was already deeply embedded by the time X rebranded. Users had been ریتویت کردن each other’s protest posts for over a decade, and the verb felt load-bearing. Calling the act “ریپوست کردن” felt foreign in a different way, a corporate intrusion, and Iranian users rejected it. The Persian internet has a way of choosing which loanwords it loves and which it ignores, and the rebrand lost.

How to use it

in matlab ro retweet kon, hatman bayad bisahbi nashe.

Retweet this post, it should not stay unanswered.

این مطلب رو ریتویت کن، حتماً باید بی‌صاحبی نشه.

tweet-esh ro retweet kardam vali bad gozashtam ke akharin azay-e family-am ro az dast nadam.

I retweeted his tweet but then deleted it so I would not lose the last members of my family.

توییتش رو ریتویت کردم ولی بعد گذاشتم که آخرین اعضای فمیلیم رو از دست ندم.

In our voice

The survival of ریتویت کردن tells you something about Iranian internet culture. Words get adopted because they are useful, and once a word does political work, it sticks. The retweet did political work. The repost did not. Persian kept the older word.

References

• Dehkhoda, ریتویت
• Vajehyab, ریتویت