In an effort to “put an end to casual homophobia,” the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Service at the University of Alberta has fashioned the NoHomophobes tracker, which logs every use of the word “faggot” and other gay slurs across Twitter.

And the results are pretty staggering.

It’s definitely no surprise that phrases like “faggot” and “so gay” are often used on the social networking site. But the sheer volume of use is pretty impressive. NoHomophobes.com began tracking the words on July 5th, and in just 11 weeks the word “faggot” was used over 2.5 million times. That means that every week, around 228,000 tweets go out containing the controversial word.

The site also tracks uses of the phrase “so gay,” “no homo,” and “dyke.” In 11 weeks, they’ve seen 896,756 uses of “so gay,” 818,652 uses of “no homo,” and 346,977 uses of “dyke.”

If you visit the site, you can also see a constant feed of all tweets containing these phrases.

Of course, words like “faggot” are not always used in a purely derogatory manner. They have been inserted into our lexicon in ways that vary from the original meaning. That’s precisely the point, according to the initiative. They want to make people aware of just how casually people throw around the words that are oftentimes hurtful to large portions of the population:

“This website is designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society. Words and phrases like “faggot,” “dyke,” “no homo,” and “so gay” are used casually in everyday language, despite promoting the continued alienation, isolation and — in some tragic cases — suicide of sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ) youth.

We no longer tolerate racist language, we’re getting better at dealing with sexist language, but sadly we’re still not actively addressing homophobic and transphobic language in our society,” they explain.

If you extrapolate their data, you find that the word “faggot” will be tweeted almost 12 million times this year. If you want to show your support for their cause, they ask you to tweet using the #nohomophobes hashtag.

[via ThinkProgress]