Bluesky Dictionary: A Real-Time English Word Coverage Experiment

August 7, 2025

This project tracks the appearance of every English word on the Bluesky social media platform, offering a dynamic visualization of its vocabulary coverage.

The Backstory

I was fascinated by the public nature of the Bluesky stream and wondered: could we track every word in the English language posted there? I built this project as a quirky experiment to see how far we could go. The community participationā€”people consciously posting obscure wordsā€”has been an unexpected and delightful bonus, transforming it into a collaborative word-finding game!

How to Play

Watch the progress: Observe the percentage of the English language covered in real-time.Suggest words: Help push the boundaries by suggesting obscure words.Contribute data: Share your posts to increase the dataset's size and accuracy.

From The Community: Top Comments

Damn itā€™s already at 37% thatā€™s fast. But theoretically it should slow down as we wait for it to hit more uncommon words right?

Now someone is going to make an account and post all English words just to get to 100% faster after seeing this.

Now that's actually interesting

My antivirus blocks not the website, but the API call it makes... So for me it just reads as zeros across the board!

The Remix Station

Think this toy has more potential? Vote for your favorite remix idea!

ā˜ļø Word Cloud Whirlwind

Visualize word frequency with an interactive, animated word cloud that responds to new word additions.

0 Votes

šŸ† Lexical Leaderboard

Create a leaderboard ranking users by the number of unique words they contribute to the Bluesky dictionary.

0 Votes

Frequently Asked Questions

How accurate is the word count, and what about slang or proper nouns?

Accuracy depends on Bluesky's API data; slang and proper nouns pose challenges but are gradually added with community input.

Will the project ever reach 100% coverage of the English language?

Theoretically, yes; practically, it's a massive undertaking and depends on Bluesky's user base and activity.