Well, the use of the word, anyway: See chart here.
Here’s the article that pointed me to the gadget.
Whoa, I see some serious timewasting in my future.
If you come up with any good comparisons, share them here!
Google Labs - Books Ngram Viewer
Phrases in books, by year, with graphs:
Jesus, the Beatles (Jesus wins)
fer sure peaked in 1958.
Hippy only overtook beatnik in 1971
War vs. Peace, 1900-2000. War is much more popular, especially around wartime.
Merged duplicate threads.
The patterns look a bit different if you extend the search to 2008 (apparently the last year available).
Groovy peaked in 1971, but had a resurgence starting in the 1990s.
Actually, it started going up again in the late 1970s. It may still be going up.
Good has been declining relative to evil, but it’s used far more often.
Penis and vagina both took a major dive about 1926. I wonder what happened then?
:eek:
Is it just me or do a whole lot of words having to to with sex. reproductive organs, and obscenity take a sharp dip in the middle 1920s, assuming they appeared at all before the 20s?
I suspect that vulgarities were more often used in writing by the poor who wrote as they spoke, rather than the rich who still belonged to the old way. Come the depression, and only the rich are still able to write.
But this was before the Depression, 25-26-27.
This could be an artifact of the culture, or the publishing industry, or even the database (for instance, if those years were underrepresented for some reason).
I may just be a bit slow, but I can’t find what the y-axis represents. Is it frequency of the word, i.e., in 1900, 9 words out of every 10,000 were “man”?
That’s the way I interpret it. Is there another way?
Another article, this time from the New York Times, on the new tool.
football
baseball
basketball
hockey
Interesting links! I thought I noticed a slight uptick in “man” the last decade.
FWIW in early Germanic languages “man” or its cognates was the gender-neutral word for “humanity” or “someone”/“anyone”, while “were” or its cognates denoted a male adult (e.g. “werewolf”, “weregeld”).
oven
stove
microwave