Facebook users do not 'pause and reflect' on posts so dictionary definitions do not apply, the Supreme Court has ruled in a landmark defamation case.

Nicola Stocker, 51, had been found by two previous courts to have libelled her ex-husband Ronald Stocker after telling his new lover that he had tried to strangle her.

The judge used the Oxford English Dictionary to define strangling and decide that because she was still alive she had implied that her millionaire ex was trying to kill her when in fact his intention when putting his hand round her neck during an argument was "to silence, not to kill".

But the ruling was overturned by the highest court in the country on Wednesday in what has been described as a “victory for common sense”.

Lord Kerr said that judges have to consider what the ordinary reader would have thought the words meant and Mr Justice Mitting should have taken into account that Facebook is a fleeting medium.

“People scroll through it quickly. They do not pause and reflect,” he said in the judgment. “They do not ponder on what meaning the statement might possibly bear. Their reaction to the post is impressionistic and fleeting.”