Le Mot du Jour (ou presque)

Le Mot du Jour (ou presque), roughly “the word of the day, more or less”, is a parody dictionary in French. Each weekday at 9:00 it publishes one word taken from the news with a satirical definition; at weekends it stops. You choose when the reminder arrives, from 9:00 onwards, and declining notifications blocks nothing.

The column ran from 2009 to 2015 and then went quiet for eleven years. Its archive of 555 definitions is built into the app and readable offline from the first launch. One search field covers four columns, the date, the word, the author and the definition, ignoring accents and capital letters, and each result shows which field matched. Any definition can be shared as a black-and-white card with the word, the text and the date.

The definitions only comment on what is public: offices, institutions, statements and behaviour that media coverage has made common property. The 2009 to 2015 archive names public figures of its time; since the revival, new definitions point without naming anyone, and no private individual is targeted. Anyone who feels a definition concerns them has a free right of reply, published under the definition itself.

• A new word and its satirical definition every weekday at 9:00, with the reminder time set by the reader
• 555 archived definitions from 2009 to 2015, built in and readable offline
• Search across date, word, author and definition text, ignoring accents and capitals
• Each definition shareable as a black-and-white card with the word and date
• No account, no tracking and no data collected; reminders are scheduled on the device

Le Mot du Jour appeared from 2009 to 2015 and then stopped. The app brings it back with its archive intact and a new word each weekday. Satire about public life needs rules, and the app states them on its store page: it targets offices and institutions rather than private people, new definitions no longer name anyone, and a right of reply is published under the definition it answers. The same restraint applies to data. The app collects nothing, schedules its reminder locally and makes only two network requests, neither of which identifies the reader.

The developer has been writing native Apple software since the first public iPhone SDK in 2008. He works from Rennes, France, under SAS Corvaisier, and has published 24 apps across 7 platforms, from iPhone and iPad through to Apple Watch, Mac, Apple TV, Android, Fire TV and Roku. Everything is built natively, one platform at a time, with no cross-platform wrapper in between.