Fun tool for you, and now some social science on it: the Google Ngram

January 03, 2020

Small little post:

 

I like the Google N-gram viewer, which I use from time to time, more as provocation.  It allows me to check on any word, or phrase, and see how frequently it appears in published books.  It's an imperfect source of data, but it's pretty cool.  Especially for showing change over time, it's pretty interesting.  You should check it out.

Here is a piece on what the Google Ngram viewer is, and how you can use it.  Here is a recent scholarly piece suggesting it may be not entirely untrustworthy.