Friday, May 25, 2012

Google Lab's Ngram Viewer

Sorry not to have been with you for a week but my week has been a bit busier than usual!  (= awesomely busy!!!)

'Awesome' is not a word I normally use regularly.  How long has the word 'awesome' been around?  10 years?  100 years?  How can I find out?

One very quick way of checking is to visit the Google Ngram Viewer:  http://books.google.com/ngrams/

If you feed in the word 'awesome' like I did, you get a graph like this:



From this we can see that the word 'awesome' does not appear to have been widely in use before 1870, and became very popular and frequent around 1980. The graph shows how a word which has existed for hundreds of years but has always been very rare can suddenly acquire a much more general meaning and become a part of the everyday language when it gets picked up by teenagers. 

So what exactly is the Google Ngram Viewer?  Well, around 5.20 million books written in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian were digitalised.  This produced a database containing 500 billion words which had appeared in these books (published between 1500 and 2008).  

On the Ngram Viewer website, you can feed in a string of up to 5 words, click and within seconds, a graph charting the frequency of use of the word or string of words appears. 

For more information (and some fascinating examples of how world events and trends can influence the use of words), I thoroughly recommend the following TED talk. You'll see why I chose to use the word 'awesome' at the start of this blog post!!!




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