Twitter Account About to Finish Tweeting Every Word

@everyword will send out its last tweet Saturday
By Shelley Hazen,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 4, 2014 12:29 PM CDT
Twitter Account About to Finish Tweeting Every Word
   (Shutterstock)

After seven years spent tweeting every word in the English language one at a time, what was @everyword’s most popular tweet? “Sex.” The popular Twitter feed will finally complete its task early Saturday, but until then, creator Adam Parrish is keeping the last word that will be tweeted a secret, the Wall Street Journal reports. “Criticism of Twitter in the early days was that it’s short, meaningless, and puts everything out of context," Parrish explains. So, he decided to take that idea to the extreme in 2007, writing a program that automatically tweets one word every half-hour, the Washington Post reported last month.

Of course, the feed’s 96,000 followers took each word and ran with it. “To have people see a word in their Twitter feed and then riff off of it or to use it as the basis to make jokes with friends, that’s a big vindication for people who care both about language and technology,” Parrish says. (The second most-retweeted word? "Weed.") As the words come from an unsourced list Parrish found online, he acknowledges that the feed has probably missed some words, "but that’s the point," he says. "There’s an implied commentary there—it’s satirical in that it’s trying to do something impossible." No word on what, if anything, Parrish will do with the handle next, but he says he plans to stay awake into the wee hours to see the last word go out. (If you're into words, click to see the latest ones to get added to the dictionary.)

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