How to explore the history of word usage using Google Books

Analyse the contents of over 25 million books in a matter of seconds

When I was at college, finding specific information involved a pretty low-tech and inefficient process. You had to scan through book titles on a standalone computer (from my recollection you could at least search by keywords) to find the correct lookup code, then walk to the correct section of the library to physically track down the book. You then had to decide which particular words you were looking for and flick through the index to find pages where specific words were mentioned. Then (whilst carefully holding your finger in the relevant index pages) you needed to navigate to the page… and normally discover that the content is completely irrelevant. And repeat. For hours.

The world has changed a lot in that time, not least in how accessible, and searchable information has become. One amazing example of this I’ve just discovered is the Google Books N-gram Viewer, which enables you to instantly analyse word occurrences in a huge (at point of writing over 25 million) number of books they have digitised.

Since approximately 96.7%* of all dictionary lookups are for insults or profanities, I thought I’d use it to gain insight into the popularity of a few different terms over the years.

• Step 1: Head to the Google Books Ngram Viewer
• Step 2: Enter a few words or phrases in the search box
• Step 3: Tweak any other settings…