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

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”.