I just noticed a change in the English language: the use of the word “multiple”.
A couple decades ago, people would say “I’ve gone to Disneyland several times”
Nowadays, they say “I’ve been there multiple times”.
So I checked on Google ngrams.
The graph shows that in 1983, there is a very, very sharp rise in the use of the phrase “multiple times”
For comparison:
the graph of the phrase “several times” shows a steady decline in use, starting in 1985.
(Also, the phrase “many times” also shows a decline in use starting in 1972. )
So , my fellow Dopers, we have some profound issues to discuss:
What the hell happened in 1983?
In your personal conversations , which phrase do you use?
(The circumstances of my discovery of this critical issue: I recently spoke with a relative about how many times we spent the holidays at grandma’s house when we were kids. We both blurted out at the same moment–He said “multiple times”, I said “several times”. ) We are both the same age (late 60’s).
When and why did the vocabulary change? And has your vocabulary changed, too?
Logically, the secular trend towards increasing multiple usage could have one or more of several causes:
Whatever multiple refers to in general (call it “multiplicity”) is something that people are increasingly interested in talking and writing about;
People are becoming more academic, formal or pretentious in their speech and writing;
The academic or formal character of the word multiple is gradually being bleached away, so that people tend to use it in a wider range of contexts;
The effective meaning of multiple in general usage is gradually shifting, so that it takes up more and more “mouth space” from alternatives like many, several, or numerous.
Memetic drift (i.e. fashion) is increasing the frequency of multiple for no particular reason;
Multi-word terms involving multiple have been invented and/or have increased in frequency.
Number 1 (increasing interest in multiplicity) seems unlikely, and number 2 (increasing formality) is clearly false. So we’re left with number 3 (bleaching of register), number 4 (shifting connotation), and number 5 (memetic drift), which in cases like this can plausibly be seen as three different aspects of the same process; and number 6 (terminology), which is certainly true (e.g. multiple integral (1841), multiple sclerosis (1877), multiple personality (1886), multiple myeloma (1897), multiple regression (1908), multiple choice (1915), multiple exposure (1916) multiple intelligences (1983), etc.)
I don’t know about the trend, but personally, I use “multiple” when I want to emphasize the fact that it’s more than once, and “several” when it’s around 3-7 times, but sometimes higher. If all that matters is that it’s more than once, I say “multiple” when it’s small. if it’s 2-4 times, I sometimes say the exact number.
Somewhere over 7 times, I say neither “multiple” nor “several” but “many.”
There’s something weird about the way ngrams handles quote characters. The default example they give (Albert Einstein,Sherlock Holmes,Frankenstein) doesn’t use any quotes. If I remove the quotes from your tests, they show a very different pattern; multiple times does increase dramatically but doesn’t have the dip in 2013 that your graph shows, but several times also shows an increase, not a decrease during that same period. Plotting them together shows both increasing, but several remains much more common than multiple.
yeah, it’s weird that your results are different than mine.
When I first tried “multiple times”, ngrams corrected me and automatically changed it to " multiple times " (adding spaces between the " and the words).
Ngrams said this was done “in order to match how we processed the books”.