It took this man seven years to Tweet every word in the English language

Theguardian

June 6, 2014

Twitter is an interesting medium to put forth one’s ideas, and we have seen how Twitter is used to document the banter between a couple who have broken up due to infidelity issues, or even to recreate the exact happenings of D-Day, not to mention “watching” an entire movie via tweets. Well, you can add this to another list of quirky Twitter usage trivia – it takes 7 long years to tweet every single word in the English language at an interval of 30 minutes. One early morning on November 30th, 2007, a newly created Twitter account sent out its first tweet, with the letter “a”. 30 minutes passed before the next word was tweeted, also starting with the letter “a”. Basically, this Twitter account was created to depict words in the English language, doing so by following the alphabetical order.

After seven years and 109,000 tweets, @everyword, one of the internet’s most beloved bots, is retiring. In 2007, computer programmer and poet Adam Parrish set out to tweet every word in the English language in alphabetical order, amassing 95,000 followers along the way. On Friday 6June, the project will finally be complete. To mark the end of an era (and the alphabet), Parrish tells the Guardian what the project has taught him about people and the internet, and why it doesn’t matter that “sex”, “weed” and “vagina” are its most popular words. In late 2007, Twitter was a new thing. It was an exciting time, but I was a Twitter skeptic. The way I saw it, people were posting meaningless things, totally out of context. I wanted to satirize the brevity of Twitter messages would be to make a bot that would post individual words. But now I see Twitterdifferently. It’s kind of a magical writing experiment, and it’s amazing that so many people participate. I was also inspired by different writers and artists, like Kenneth Goldsmith’s “uncreative writing“. A digital art piece called “Every Icon” gave me the idea to call it “everyword”.