Monkey News

One month ago, back when only a small handful of nine-letter words were written, a brave Ape named Sipsy Flabber wrote our first ten-letter word - "contraries". And not only is this word impressively long, it even appears in Shakespeare's The Tempest:

I' the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;

I didn't make note of it at the time, and expected a few more 10 letter words to trickle in on a weekly basis, but nope! It's been a full month and Sipsy reigns supreme (if largely unadorned):

A minor update, but while working on improving the site performance, we now have the ability to determine each monkey's favorite words!

This is not the word your monkey has written the most (as many monkeys might share that word) but the word your monkey writes more than any other monkey. The number on the right indicates how much more often your monkey writes it than the average ape. Your monkey must have written the word at least 3 times for it to count as a favorite word.

Sorry things have been a bit quiet the last week or two!

Finally pushed a new build which rebuilt the backend a bit to accommodate an incoming update! This has been in the works for the last few weeks - you should notice loading your "Top Words of All Time" will happen nearly instantly now, rather than 5-10 seconds. This means we can more easily load fun stats when viewing a monkey - and there will be some updates over the next few days to include these.

However, more importantly, a large update is coming soon that will take advantage of this improved performance!

discuss on reddit

In just 28 short days, and with over 11,000 stinky monkeys, we have now written every four-letter word that appears in Shakespeare's works - nearly 220,000 words, meaning our productive monkeys on average contributed about 20 words each!

This includes common words like "this" and "that" as well as some more rare words like "boom" and even "apes"!

The hardest word, and our last holdout holdout was "your" - which was written 6859 times - the last of which was by Zazzy Lister. This means Zazzy is the last monkey to ever contribute a 4 letter word to our ultimate goal of writing all of Shakespeare's works!

Golden Typewriter

As a reward for accomplishing this incredible task, I'm pleased to provide every monkey that helped with a Golden Typewriter.

If your monkey joined too late to be able to contribute, don't worry, we have another milestone right around the corner...

Five-letter Words

Those five-letter words are looking decently close to completion as well! However, looks can be deceiving... While we've discovered all of them, and written 90% of the total five-letter words, some of these words have a long way to go still! For example "would" appears 2406 times in Shakespeare... but we've only written in 165 times! Only about 7% complete. At this rate, we'll probably be in 2026 by the time it's done! To speed it up, we're gonna need more monkeys (so tell your friends!) or faster monkeys.

But either way, there's still plenty of discoveries waiting to be made, and more items to earn, and more updates coming out soon!

(discuss on reddit)

For a limited time, we have a couple of Easter-themed items up for grabs!

We have a Bunny Hat that can be earned by writing "easter", "bunny", or "rabbit" - and a more common Easter Egg Basket that just needs the word "egg" or "eggs". But this even wont last long, and this is your only shot to get these rare items!

(discuss on reddit)

We've already past a number of huge milestones - billions of letters written and hundreds of millions of words - and well over halfway through Shakespeare's works (the easy half to be fair).

But this one is significant - we now have over 10,000 monkeys typing away in our universe!

If you're curious, our 10,000th monkey is Lunzo Pables, an Orangutan who has shown a liking for Pecans (or at least that's the longest word they've written thus far).

With 10,000 monkeys, each writing at 10 letters per second, our monkeys are writing over 8 billion characters per day - about 8GB of just raw text - over 1000 times larger than all the works of Shakespeare. Those sound like good odds to me!

Progress Update

On Tuesday we introduced a new goal - to complete all the four-letter words in Shakespeare's works. At that time there were seven remaining but just a few days later, we down to just four! Any monkey that has contributed to this cause (EG contributed any four-letter word since we started) will get a special reward once we hit our goal.

Don't worry if you don't think you've hit it yet, there's still around ~7000 instances of the words "your", "will", "king", and "know" - that still need to be written! Plenty to go around. We're only 52% complete with "your" - so we can expect at least another week remains for this goal, depending how much our monkey count grows.

PS: Thank You

I'd like to sincerely thank everyone that has participated so far - this project was something that I had sunk a lot of time into building, and to see that so people have enjoyed it has made it all absolutely worth it.

There's plenty of updates to come, both cosmetics, quality-of-life, and possibly some minor gameplay elements to add some more interaction if it seems we need to speed up our monkeys - stay tuned! Even if you take a few weeks off, your monkey will stay busy :)

Just a quick plug for the monkeys.zip social media accounts! I didn't have any during launch, which probably was a mistake - so feel free to follow here to see updates and any fun monkey callouts that don't fit here:

• X/Twitter - @MonkeysLLC
• Bluesky - @monkeysllc.bsky.social
• Reddit - /r/MonkeysZip

(discuss on reddit)

It's been one week since the last update, and two weeks since launch! That means it's time for some news and updates!

Some Stats

First off, some stats! As of this writing we're at 9372 monkeys!! The monkey text has ballooned our backend database to nearly 100GB of mostly entirely gibberish. But under our noses, these monkeys have been very productive.

In fact, they've written ALL the two and three-letter long words that in Shakespeare's works! Not just discovered each word, but completed every instance of those words! This includes words like "the" and "you", which occur 29,521 and 13,965 times respectively - and even the weird ones like "pip" and "tan" which each only are found once (in Taming of the Shrew and Sonnet 115)

New Goals

Now that we've completed these two and three letter words, our sights are now set on the four-letter words. As of this writing, we're already 93% of the way there in fact! We've added a new tracker to the bottom of the page which contains the current goal:

Clicking on it will show you more details about the words we still need to complete. You'll see that of the 1925 unique four-letter words in Shakespeare, we've discovered all of them! However, there are seven that have yet to be completed (IE written enough times to cover all instances in Shakespeare)

your, will, king, know, with, duke, have

The word "your" has the most work ahead - as we've only written it 2407 times out of the requisite 6859 times. Still, it's only a matter of time at this point! We know the monkeys can and will type it.

Once we hit this goal, there will be a unique trinket reward for all monkeys who contributed to it!

Monkey Sentences

There have also been a handful of other updates from the last week, my favorite being monkey sentences. When you're viewing a monkey's latest or best words, there's a new Generate Sentence button that feeds those words into an AI and makes a Shakespearean sentence out of it! Some monkeys have made some pretty absurd sentences, such as this one:

New Items

Saving the best for last, we've added three new items in this update!
A table, a chair, and a tax-day themed trinket!

Modern Desk	Tree Stump	Tax Return

Thanks to /u/Jopianos for the tree stump suggestion! Get on reddit and suggest your own ideas, and maybe they'll be added in a later update!

As always these items aren't retroactive, so your monkey will have to type the special triggers to earn them! I wonder what they are?

And in the blink of an eye, we've had a full 168 hours of monkey typing! So much has happened in the last week, it's hard to keep track. Take a look:

Some Stats

That's right - in one week we managed to do some incredible things!

• Just over five thousand monkeys!
• We've written over 65% of the content
• Discovered 7.5% of the unique words
• Spent over 70 monkey-years typing
• Wrote nearly 4 billion characters.

Quintupling Down

While progress has been amazing, we're already deep into the territory of diminishing returns. All of the easy words have been discovered - many of them mined to completion! In other words, if we're going to keep seeing progress, we're going to need more monkeys....... a LOT more monkeys.

So with that in mind, every user can now place up to 5 monkeys! Now go out and make a mess of things!

discuss on reddit

Here's our first themed update, of hopefully many more to come - the Hungry Monkey update!

With three new themed items, a picnic table, a fruit-basket, and a sandwich. Get them all, and you can have a picnic themed monkey!

Nothing limited time about this one - but if you've already written some of the words the trigger these items, your monkey will have to write them again - no retrospective items!

Most monkeys live in comfort in one great clump. This is the story of a monkey on a different path.

At the time of this writing, there are now over 3000 monkeys, clittering and clattering, typing their little opposable thumbs off. The significant proportion of them live within the Clump - the congregation of monkeys that have gathered around the center of the Infinite Plane. The Clump is the first thing you see when you load up the page (provided the server is feeling comfortable at that time). When a new user prepares to claim their monkey, there's a certain psychological magnetism to this Clump.

There's also many interesting sub formations, such as the Northern Blue Colony - or the Globe Railroad, and several satellites squares of different sizes that orbit the Clump:

But what about the monkeys that beat a different bongo? The ones that venture off into the great Expanse, unwavered by the cold emptiness. These pioneers sit alone, far away from the hustle and bustle, doing their work in eerie silence. Finding these monkeys by browsing around the map is always a special occurrence. As you navigate further from the Clump, the proportion of vacant spaces increases at an exponential rate - and finding a working monkey in that space gives a fleeting sense of connection. But some of the monkeys that wandered to far... got lost...

Lost Monkeys

The system was built knowing that monkeys would, as monkeys do, test the limits. While there are some 2 Million uniquely generated monkey names, this only covers a small portion (around 3%) of Infinity - and getting as close as we can to supporting Infinite Monkeys was really the goal. To reconcile this, monkeys sufficiently far from the Clump would be given numeric suffixes to disambiguate them - as at these distances, monkey names will inevitably repeat.

However, there was a glitch! And while some parts of the system (the part for writing words, thankfully) would properly handle these monkeys - many parts did not. These monkeys were typing, but were entirely unseen. If you had the misfortune of having one of these monkeys, you probably have struggled to ever see them again, after you first claimed them. Well not anymore!!.

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A number of fixes were just pushed to bring these Lost Monkeys back! These include cleaning up that monkey-suffix-disambiguation logic, as well as rendering changes so that when navigating to a far away monkey, it just teleports, rather than tries to load every monkey along the way (which would crash the browser). So these pioneering monkeys are back in business, and can now be properly thanked for their work! Let's investigate some of these far-out apes.

The Loneliest Monkeys

There's quite a few monkeys that are solitary to the extreme - among them might be the Dark Queen of the West, Grawldy Gosworth - who discovered the words "freesia", "raptor", and "adroit" - while sitting over 1km away from the nearest monkey (assuming the space between desks is about 2 meters).

Or perhaps Paxel Mochu, who is the furthest of our Northern monkeys (the direction least explored) and whose great works include "gopher", "sestina", and "seabee".

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However, there is one monkey so incredibly remote, that I question if I should even write his name here, lest I take impede on his nearly sacrosanct levels of isolation.

The distance at which he resides is entirely incomprehensible to primate minds... Baboons tremble on their weird butts, while Orangutans tell ancient myths of what happens to monkeys that venture too deep into the void. Some say they never return. Some say they return, but they're not the same. Some say they become changed, writhing messes, barely recognizable. All agree that though the truth is out there, it is not ours to understand...

That is, unless you can comprehend the distance from New York City to Raleigh, NC (about a 9 hour drive). For monkeys, this sort of distance is something that is altogether unnatural and unholy - so let's just say Ildy Plogel is not a thriving monkey.

Forced to type for all eternity in this bizarre, painful quantum state, even his desk and typewriter struggle to maintain their sense of identity. He hasn't discovered nor contributed any words. He types with hands like jello, waggling in his float-point-error-induced mania.

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Well, what can you do, that's life sometimes I guess. Stay tuned for more monkey updates!

Just chiming in with a few minor updates!

• Server performance should be pretty solid now! Upgraded to a much bigger machine to handle all the traffic and all the monkeys and all the bananas.
• You can now sort monkey words by "Top" or "Discovered" or "Contributes" (they all have some amount of overlap)
• You can now see how other monkeys achieved their items by tapping on them in the gear screen
• Check out the community at /r/MonkeysZip!

Stay tuned for more updates! Now that the server issues have calmed down I can focus on highlighting some of our more interesting primates!

First, a round of applause for all the monkeys working very hard to make sure this service becomes as difficult as possible to run! 👏👏👏

Today was spent putting out various database fires, not always succesfully. But it's understandable, considering that 3000 monkeys have written over 17 million words in the last day or so. But have no fear, we'll be back up and running in a moment, currently expanding disk capacity, which is the limiting factor right now.

In the meantime, there's been a few updates as well! You'll notice (when back up) that you can now set the color of your monkey's background! A small feature so you and your monkey neighbors can collaborate on themes! There's also been a handful of new items added!

• A stack of books
• Rare space helmet
• Rocking chair
• Others????

I hope you've been enjoying this experiment so far! Later tonight I'll have a followup post to meet some more of our interesting monkeys! Thanks for your patience!

Hey there, quick update! We now have /r/MonkeysZip if you want to share feedback, a particularly funny monkey, or yell at me that a Discord would be more appropriate! Come hang out!

On April 1st, 2025, around 11:00am EST, the first monkeys began typing. The very first word that the very first monkey typed... was "v". Just, "v".

You might argue that the letter V is not a word. That it shouldn't count, and that the monkeys I provide are clearly useless. I might not disagree with you. But you know who would?

SHAKESPEARE.

You see, a standalone "v" appears 518 times within the works of Shakespeare. Sure, nearly all of them refer to Henry V - but that's who Skirissa Shmulpy was referring to as well.

Well, in the subsequent hours, the rest of our monkey cohort really couldn't help themselves but continue to type "v" thousands upon thousands of times. More times than Shakespeare could've ever dreamed of. Once a word is written as many times as it appears within his works, consider this word completed. Monkeys who continue to type it will no longer receive the bonus points for contributing it.

Completed words

So what other words have the monkeys completed? A whopping 2170 words! Of course all the letters, words like "the", "of", "are". But also some impressive one-hit-wonders such as:

• nemesis (claimed by Bozzy Karro)
• heareth (Cranky Gaster)
• spades (Flanny Lisworth)

and - the most highly esteemed,

• esteemest (Lezzle Twirro)

Which is a stunning nine letters long. "Banananas" is also nine letters but no monkey has yet claimed it.

Long words

While we're on the topic of nine-letter words, let's also take a peek at what we have on that side of things, Shakespearean or otherwise.

We've got two hearty eight letter words:

• anisette (Nelfo Frigel)
• faltered (Izzle Scratt)

And a digestible portion of 7 letter words:

 riveted  deceits  laertes  seibels  vintage 
 caterer  uraemia  nemesis  cringed  thither 
 othello  daisies  tibetan  bearlet  parapet 
 marians  shitted  teeside  throats  pretext 
 settled  gloated  setters  notthat  tissues 
 retouch  sesames  gravels  married  tanners 

BUT! The longest word, is, indeed "esteemest" at nine imposing letters. Lezzle absolutely knocked it out of the park on that one.

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I hope you enjoyed this update, I have lots more updates in the pipeline, both on the monkey-field and here, so stay tuned. Thanks for joining and enjoying this project with me.