Summary

  • On 6 October 2000, Anu Garg announced 4,112 votes for five weekly mailings and 4,049 for seven. A.Word.A.Day would switch to weekdays the following week.
  • The service’s original archives distinguish an early system outage from an agreed publishing pause; its 2004 RSS and permalink announcement added ways to find an individual word.

A.Word.A.Day had a small problem with its name. It promised a word a day, and some readers wanted two days a week to remain gloriously unimproved. Others wanted the words to keep coming. In September 2000, the mailing list sent the matter to a vote. Even the dictionary had to negotiate its hours.

The ballot fitted inside an email. In the 29 September announcement, Anu Garg offered two destination addresses: one beginning FIVE, the other SEVEN. Readers chose by sending a message to the corresponding mailbox. He asked for one vote per person and promised results in a week. The same channel that delivered vocabulary could carry a decision about how often that vocabulary should arrive.

The weekend won by a whisker

The 6 October result gave five mailings 4,112 votes and seven mailings 4,049. Subtract the totals and the weekend’s majority was 63. Garg announced that the following week would bring five editions.

His selection of reader comments made the arithmetic more interesting. Some wanted time to absorb the words. Others worried about the people producing them. One preferred daily delivery partly because its arrival showed that her email was working. A single message could be a lesson, a familiar appointment and a reassuring little pulse from the network.

Those preferences pointed in different directions. The reader catching up on Friday’s vocabulary welcomed an empty Saturday inbox. The reader using the mailing as a sign of life might notice exactly that silence. A publication schedule organised expectations as well as work. Changing it required telling people what the silence would mean.

The dictionary had already gone missing once

The March 1994 archive begins with zephyr on 14 March. The first weekend has entries too. Later that month, a posting explains that a system outage had interrupted delivery. The archive preserves both the gap and the explanation.

Set that beside the October 2000 vote. In the earlier case, machinery interrupted an intended habit. In the later one, editor and respondents deliberately changed the habit. To someone watching only an inbox, both events could look like missing mail. The dated notices give them different histories.

The October archive also keeps the transition admirably concrete. Saturday 7 October brought abjure; Sunday 8 October brought actuate. Then came the working week of 9–13 October, followed by Monday the 16th. The newsletter finished its last seven-day week before settling into the new rhythm. A calendar is a rather effective place to check a promise about days.

A word could have an address of its own

Four years later, the project widened the ways its work could travel. Garg’s 14 March 2004 anniversary message announced RSS feeds and a permalink at the end of each daily newsletter, intended for bloggers linking to a particular word.

An inbox delivered an edition to its subscriber. An individual link let someone point another reader straight to that edition’s word. RSS offered a further subscription route. The editorial job still involved choosing and presenting vocabulary; its distribution no longer depended on that one arrival in that one mailbox.

The weekend vote had put a boundary around recurring delivery. The new links made already published work easier to pass along. Together they reveal a pleasingly practical ambition: a small publication could adjust its demands on people while giving its words more places to go. Even a dictionary deserves to put its feet up.