WASHINGTON—It appeared at 12:06 a.m., without warning, like a shooting star through the dark night, if the star was half of a real word and that half of a word was attached to the suffix “fefe” and then it just stayed up there for hours for some reason.

Covfefe. Noun. (Was it a noun? It seems like it was trying to be a noun.) A word used, Wednesday, by the president of the United States.

It has come to this. To the confusion, delight and genuine alarm of the night owls of the world’s most powerful country, Donald Trump wrote the following six words to his 31 million Twitter followers early on Wednesday morning: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”

That was it.

Covfefe.

There was no period. There was no rest of the sentence.

Covfefe.

We know he meant “coverage.” But he did not make a correction, at least not immediately. Unlike Trump’s many other Twitter goofs, which he tends to amend within minutes, this one was left online for almost six hours, which was entertaining while also concerning.

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Was nobody in the Trump administration awake? Did nobody in the Trump administration think they could or should tell the president to fix an embarrassing error? Had there been an actual mid-sentence emergency?

Trump finally deleted the tweet six hours after it went up. At 6:09 a.m., he tweeted a rare bit of self-deprecation: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’??? Enjoy!”

Until then, people on the Internet did the deprecating for him, making tens of thousands of jokes. It was impossible, obviously, to compete with the original.

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“What makes me saddest,” wrote late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, “is that I know I’ll never write anything funnier than #covfefe.”

But the Internet people tried. Oh, they tried. For a brief moment in time, Twitter, that cesspool of bitterness, returned to its roots as a giddy gathering of bad amateur comics.

They offered mocking definitions. (“When you want to say ‘coverage’ but your hands are too small to hit all the letters on your keyboard,” read one entry on Urban Dictionary.) They made comedic purchases. (“My dad just bought the CA license plate ‘COVFEFE,’” Talya Cooper tweeted with a photo of the triumphant fellow.) There was silliness and pointedness.

“When mom asks you to use your questionable 7-letter Scrabble play in a sentence,” said writer Louis Virtel.

“Not only is covfefe a word,” actor Zach Braff wrote under a photo of Trump press secretary Sean Spicer, “it’s the greatest word ever uttered.”

“Everybody can chill, he fixed it,” said writer Cody Johnston, pointing to an image that read: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe, im doonk a goolb jerbb an togentchroh we mac armargollp great again!”

Covfefe remained Twitter’s top trending topic until it was deleted just before 6 a.m. The president’s tweet had more than 100,000 retweets.

For a few hours, Donald Trump had brought the world together.

No. Of course he hadn’t.

U.S. President Donald Trump has spoken with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani about the massive truck bomb that killed nearly 100 people in Kabul. Spokesman Sean Spicer says the call occurred Wednesday afternoon.

Trump’s staunchest supporters were unwilling to betray any hint of a chuckle. With Trump’s aides apparently asleep — the White House confirmed Tuesday that communications director Mike Dubke plans to resign — Kayleigh McEnany, one of the president’s designated defenders on CNN, began tweeting that covfefe was all part of the master plan.

“Covfefe — our President is human. Hilarious! Funny to watch left go nuts,” she wrote. “An intentional ‘dog will chase the tail’ tweet!”

The real Spicer was asked about the tweet in his afternoon press briefing. He was not at all amused.

“The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant,” Spicer said.

He declined to elaborate.

With files from Alanna Rizza

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