March 14, 2011

Ngram This, My Pitbull

Not sure if this has made the rounds on Clusterflock, but google has this addicting new tool called the Ngram viewer which lets you mine the history of language patterns. When you enter words or phrases into the Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how often these words occurred in a “corpus” of some 18 million books (depending on language chosen), by the year the book was published.

[via the sadly soon-to-be-defunct On Language column of NY Times]

posted by in information architecture, language | * | 7 comments 

comments

  1. Sheila Ryan on March 14th, 2011 at 3:58 pm

    Mind the gap: the dyer’s hand.

    Okay. I know what I’m doing this evening.

  2. Derek White on March 14th, 2011 at 4:07 pm

    I’ve been playing with it for hours, it’s addicting. Also try switching back and forth between U.S. and British English.

  3. Sheila Ryan on March 14th, 2011 at 4:13 pm

    There’s an idea. I’m always switching between forms of US and British English anyways.

  4. Joel Bernstein on March 14th, 2011 at 5:29 pm

    I think the most surprising thing on that graph was the history of “meme”

  5. Derek White on March 15th, 2011 at 12:43 am

    If you look up meme in the dictionary it says it’s a new term coined by Richard Dawkins in Selfish Gene circa late 1970s. I wonder what context it was used in before then…

  6. Dan on March 15th, 2011 at 12:21 pm

    For a while I thought that ‘fuck’ was peaking in relation to the two world wars. I thought, “Hmm, makes sense I suppose. But why the drop off?”

  7. Derek White on March 15th, 2011 at 12:29 pm

    Fuck used to mean something. It used to be a contender. Like sticking a stick in the ground or something. Of german origin i think.

Leave a Reply