Everyword

by Allison Parrish

From 2007 to 2014, the Twitter account @everyword painstakingly tweeted every word in the English language to thousands of riveted followers worldwide. Containing all 109,157 words from the original run of the account, along with accurate counts of the number of times each was favorited and retweeted by Twitter users, Everyword: The Book provides an accelerated, “director’s cut” experience of the English language like no other, as well as—in Parrish’s writing on her methods, inspirations, and reactions to the initial reception of @everyword—a deeply personal look at the intersection of conceptual art and secret humanity.

"[Everyword] forced us to consider words as social objects and was fundamentally concerned with a rethinking of context in a contextless age."— Slate

"A ‘conceptual dictionary’ (recording the popularity of its own lexical entries)—this inventory lists all the ‘components’ in the lovely, if not brutal, machinery of discourse itself. The book itemizes every piece of a common puzzle, out which of which we must make our individual identities for expression in the world. Find your word—and like it."—Christian Bök

"At long last: every word in the English language compiled in a single volume."—Darius Kazemi

2338 pages, ebook

Published October 13, 2015

Reviews

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't read this for the list of @everyword tweets (unless you really want to, of course): read it for @aparrish's sublime introduction on identity, the nature of a “word”, and how implementation details leak out of the computer. (Also a great, if perhaps niche, drop cap joke.)

[Jeanne Thornton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title is not a lie.