Twitter exists solely for people to answer the question “What are you doing?”, and its users have been answering that question thousands of times per day since it launched. In an effort to find out what exactly Twitter’s users are doing, I checked a sample of 500,000 tweets to see what the most common “-ing” verbs were. Listed below are my findings: the 101 most common actions and the number of times they appeared in the 500,000 messages.

Some interesting observations: “going” beats “coming”, “sitting” tops “standing”, “listening” outranks “talking”, “downloading” wins out over “uploading”, and in the feel-good story of the year, “loving” (#53) reigns supreme over “fighting” (#93).