tl

1. 1
   nounabbreviation

   Abbreviation of timeline.

   Something funny showed up on my tl earlier.

   He scrolled through his tl during the long meeting.

   Note

   A social-media shortening, not a general one: what it abbreviates is the feed of posts a user scrolls, not a chart of historical events. It nearly always takes a possessive, as in on my tl or all over my tl, and is typed in lowercase, the way Twitter users wrote it in 2022 and 2023. Keep it for casual posts and messages; elsewhere, spell out timeline.

2. 2
   symbol · Tl

   Chemical symbol for the element thallium.

   Hair samples from the patient showed unusually high levels of Tl.

   The label on the vial read Tl, with a skull printed beneath it.

   Note

   The second letter is a lower-case L, as in every two-letter element symbol, and in many typefaces it looks almost exactly like a capital I. That makes the symbol easy to misread, and it sits only one letter away from Ti, the symbol for titanium. The capital T is also what keeps it apart from the lower-case tl that shortens timeline.

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