They've also announced that the entire dataset of n-grams will be made available for download. The big news is that Google has set up a site called the Google Books Ngram Viewer where the public can enter words or n-grams (to 5) for any period and corpus and see the resulting graph. Geoff Nunberg of the University of California Berkeley welcomes the research, and the new Google tool, but looks forward to more bells and whistles: The Guardian kicks sand in the face of the Daily Mail #ngrams - less than a minute ago via TweetDeck Martin Robbinsįriday 3.27pm: A vast collection of Google ngrams is already being amassed at #ngrams on Twitter.įriday 3.21pm: A bona fide linguistics researcher has weighed in with a blopost at the Language Log. It's certainly intriguing, but what it actually means is hard to say.įriday 17 December 3.34pm: Our own Martin Robbins has used the tool to identify a marked cultural trend in favour of a certain liberal-leaning newspaper. That the word "pagan" is now in much wider usage than "christian" is remarkable indeed.īut as Christopher Collins comments in an email: "It seems that this search engine does not really answer any questions, but rather generates hypotheses that could direct research into culture." Collins had fun comparing "present" and "future" in English and other languages.
Meanwhile, the popularity of Pagans has remained remarkably stable over the same period. After a peak in around 1810, it seems the dominance of Christians in the literary corpus went into steep decline in the 1840s and they have been bumping along the bottom ever since. Monday 20 December 3.47pm: Tom Beesley got an "intriguing result" when he compared the usage of the words "pagan" and "christian" between 18 (see above). Tuesday 21 December 5.44pm: Some very interesting graphs of ngrams from Information is Beautiful, including the occurrence of different types of recreational drugs (cocaine is suprisingly common in Victorian times), ketchup v salsa, gay v homosexual and religion vs science. I have no preconceptions about which came first what seemed surprising to me was how early either was used. The graph shows that the American "math" has always been more popular than British "maths" but the use of the American English word rocketed from 1940 onwards.įrom these data it seems math has been much used through history, earlier and to a greater extent than maths. Tuesday 21 December 5.51pm: Ever wonder which is more popular, "math" or "maths"? At Travels in a Mathematical World, the authors look at the rise and fall of these two ways of shortening mathematics.
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