

Google Ngram Experiments - solipsist
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/google-ngram-experiments/

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nl
My favorite thing is seeing memes that die out for various reasons.

The best example I've found is "king cotton" (the idea that European powers
would intervene in the American civil war to protect their supplies of
cotton):
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=king+cotton&y...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=king+cotton&year_start=1820&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

Another that compares a few and their cultural impact. Did you know that
Phrenology probably had more cultural impact than UFO's did?
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Phrenology%2CSpir...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Phrenology%2CSpiritualism%2CUFO&year_start=1820&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

Here's a dead scientific theory:
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=luminiferous&...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=luminiferous&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

The success of a socio-political movement:
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Woman%27s+Suffrag...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Woman%27s+Suffrage&year_start=1700&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

The death of Wade-Giles and rise of Pinyin for Chinese:
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Peking%2CBeijing&...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Peking%2CBeijing&year_start=1820&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

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moultano
Here's my set of them: [http://moultano.blogspot.com/2010/12/history-through-
google-...](http://moultano.blogspot.com/2010/12/history-through-google-books-
ngrams.html)

I got totally addicted to this for 24 hours and couldn't do anything else.
Completely amazing. I believe history now!

~~~
RickRoll
>> I believe history now!

This statement makes so little sense ...

~~~
moultano
For me this is the first time I've (indirectly) looked at primary sources. I'm
no longer relying on the benevolence of some other expert, I can check the
data myself!

~~~
RickRoll
Well 1st IMHO you can say you believe the version of history you've been
thought in school (you didn't believe before there is any history?). Obviously
there are different official versions in differ countries. For example
according to US schoolbooks US was the primary reason Germany&Co lost WW2, but
not so in Russian schoolbooks.

2nd I don't see how you've checked any data. Say you see word 'terror' is
mentioned many times after 2001. What if most of the books say 9/11 was an
inside job and there were no terrorist? The fact that the word 'terror' is
used often in books doesn't mean there was actual terror going on.

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albertsun
Here's another curated set. <http://ngrams.tumblr.com/>

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guscost
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=satan,antichrist,...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=satan,antichrist,brimstone,blasphemy,fuck&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

Most interesting one I could find. Jesus hates swear words, apparently.

~~~
shadowpwner
Do you understand the history behind this? I didn't imagine that "fuck' was
used so often.

~~~
guscost
Well, I do know that it's never meant anything but what it means today. It was
probably more common in oral circulation than written down, but it probably
did show up in text too. I think that the Second Great Awakening would have
effectively eliminated it from print during the period the graph shows. From
Wikipedia:

"Though it appeared in John Ash's 1775 A New and Complete Dictionary, listed
as "low" and "vulgar," and appearing with several definitions,[10] fuck did
not appear in any widely-consulted dictionary of the English language from
1795 to 1965. Its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary (along
with the word cunt) was in 1972. There is anecdotal evidence of its use during
the American Civil War."

@tom: Ah, very interesting. OCR error would have been my second guess.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=EIBIJunqzeUC&pg=PA278&#...</a><p>"War will
fuck away their souls."

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srean
Some older comments here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2013346>

Surprisingly enough I could not get a hit with k-grams of

"Almost but not quite entirely unlike tea."

But k-grams of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" worked.

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jeremydavid
I would love for someone to download all the data and put together lists of
the most frequent 10,000 1, 2, 4, and 5 ngrams.

The datasets are just too large for my computer to handle.

<http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/datasets>

~~~
bobf
What would you do with it? (I know there are lots of uses, but what's yours?)

~~~
jeremydavid
I'm working on a language app and an authoritative (and public domain) list of
the most frequent words / phrases would be tremendously helpful :)

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zitterbewegung
Most interesting one that I found was woot
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=woot&year_sta...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=woot&year_start=1820&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)
its actually used in the 1800s

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thmzlt
FORTRAN and Lisp:
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=FORTRAN,Lisp&...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=FORTRAN,Lisp&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=10)

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kapilkaisare
Interestingly, science begins to trump religion at approximately the same time
that freedom begins to trump justice.

Not that I'm complaining, but what happened during the 1920s?

~~~
nl
The modern world began.

Seriously - WW1 ended, and people began to understand the impact of
technology.

Motorized and air transport, radio, Communism, womens rights and the rise to
dominance of the US all were trends that were well underway in the 1920s, but
were either non-existent or very rare in 1910.

~~~
RickRoll
Ppl began to understand the impact of technology in 1918? What have you been
smoking? ;)

~~~
nl
I assume you disagree? Are you saying they understood it earlier or later?

Prior to WW1 (in Europe anyway), there was a distinct class-based disconnect
on the impact of technology on society. Yes, the upper/political classes knew
that it meant many more people had moved to the cities, and many
industrialists were becoming rich.

But it was the impact of technology on warfare that forced the political
classes to consider idea that technology leadership was a matter of national
existence.

At the same time, the industrial scale of the war, and the huge number of
people who lost their life led to wide-spread questioning of the political
classes by the working class, which in turn led to an interest in the things
that did affect them so much during the war: technology.

~~~
RickRoll
Nonsense. So hunter-gatherers didn't understand the impact of sharper stone
knifes. And ALL technology prior to 20th century was an accident. Nobody could
see the impact of an iron sword. And people in 19th century western Europe
didn't understand that say Opium wars were won through better technology.

~~~
nl
In the first two of these cases it was thought of as a one off advancement
(eg, see the mythology around the discovery of iron - typically it involves a
gift from a god).

In the case of the opium wars, the "lesson" learnt was the same lesson as
during the subjection of India and other European colonies, ie: the cultural
superiority of the white man.

Obviously is retrospect this was the wrong lesson, but that's what people
thought at the time.

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nitrogen
I love the spate of unbalanced parentheses around 1700. Probably an OCR
failure, but still amusing.

------
RickRoll
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=google,microsoft,...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=google,microsoft,yahoo&year_start=1975&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=1)

~~~
LeBleu
It is case-sensitive, try the following instead:

[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Google%2CMicrosof...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Google%2CMicrosoft%2CYahoo&year_start=1975&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=1)

