Everyword

About

Everyword (@everyword) is a novelty Twitter account which tweets out one word every 30 minutes from an alphbetical list of over 100,000 English language words. Launched in November 2007, the account is scheduled to complete the list in June 2014.

Origin

The Twitter account @Everyword^[1] sent out its first tweet on November 30th, 2007, which featured the first word in the English language, “A.” The account was created by poet and computer programmer Allison Parrish^[3]^[12] as her graduate project for the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.

The account is run by a Python script that consistently tweets one word every thirty minutes. It gets the words from a list Parrish found online which contains 109,229 words.^[4] As of June 2014, the account has tweeted more than 109,0000 words in the English language and managed to gain over 95,000 followers. The account completed its task on June 7th, 2014.

Spread

On October 8th, 2011, Gawker^[6] published a profile of @Everyword creator Adam Parrish titled “One Man’s Quest to Tweet Every Word in the English Language.” In it, Parrish explained his motivation for beginning the account saying:

“It began as kind of a snarky stunt---a parody of (what I perceived to be) the needless verbosity of Twitter. ‘You like posting words on Twitter? Well, here’s a thing that is posting EVERY word! ha HA!’”

On April 24th, 2012, Nick Bilton^[7] wrote about @everyword in a blog post titled “The Letter “P” and the Everyword Bot,” which revealed that, at the time of the writing, the account’s most shared favorited tweets all began with the letter “P," possibly due to an exceptionally visible presence of profane language in them. However as of June 2014, the three most shared and favorited tweets^[13] are sex, weed and vagina.

On September 4th, 2013, Artcritical^[8] published a post titled “The Geeky Singularity is Near: Carla Gannis Shares Her Bookmarks,” which included @Everyword. On May 23rd, 2014, The Washington Post published an article titled “What happens when @everyword ends?” which examined the account’s history and legacy in light of its upcoming completion. In early June 2014, several websites reported on the account’s end date, including Buzzfeed^[2] and The Wall Street Journal.

Notable Examples

SearchEveryWord

On April 19th, 2013, John Holden^[10], self described “projectist,” launched searcheveryword/for-sentences^[11], a search engine for @Everyword tweets which allows the user to enter a sentence and see the @Everyword tweets containing the words which make up the sentence. A few months before the sentence search engine was launched, Holden released a basic, single word search^[9] for @Everyword tweets.

Derivatives

After the original script gained popularity, many other Twitters undertook the basic concept of @Everyword, either expanding it for parody or humor, or writing a script to tweet individual portions of a similar database. Developers like Ramsey Nasser and vogon have distributed scripts via Github that enable people to create their own style of Twitter bot. Developers of these types of Twitter bot often include when the script will cease running in the profile of the Twitter account – some theoretically extend hundreds of years into the future. Some examples include:

• @Fuckeveryword– Tweets every word in the English language preceded by the word “fuck.”

• @Everycolorbot– Tweets every hexadecimal color value, accompanied by a square of the represented color.

• @Everywordisgay– Tweets every word in the English language followed by the phrase “is gay.”

• @Everyarabicword– Tweets every word in the Arabic language.

• @Everyunicode– Tweets every unicode character value.

• @LetterEvery– Tweets every possible combination of four letters.