Cool Tools: When The New York Times First Says It, This Twitter Bot Tracks It

The bot [@NYT_first_said] is a computer program that scrapes The Times’s website hourly for new articles and compares them against a memory bank of words the paper has previously used. The bot then tweets the words that appear to be new. On a typical day, it posts a handful of tweets, comprising neologisms, scientific terms, words in foreign languages and the occasional typo.

[Clip]

To date, @NYT_first_said has tracked more than 13,000 first appearances in The Times. Many of the most popular ones have come when The Times has used colorful slang — like “thiccc,” “hypebeasts” and “shooketh.”