Language evolution

Tue 03 December 2013

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Many N-grams (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

I just found a tool that existed long ago: the google books ngram viewer. It basically counts the occurrence of a ngram (not restricted to a word) in books digitised by google and present this number versus the year the book the ngram is in has been edited.

I still don't know all the possible usages but I can list th following:

the visualisation of birth and adoption of a word
the monitoring of replacement of a word by another (just plot two word)
trends in topics that can be linked to global events

If you have any other usage, don't hesitate to tell me.

(Non-)Related articles

Social Media Resource of the Day: Google books Ngram Viewer (socialmediapower.com)
How To: Google Books Ngram Viewer (greenwichvillagehistory.wordpress.com)
Google Labs' NGram Viewer: what we learned from 5 million books (nextlevelofnews.com)
5 graphiques étonnants sur le vocabulaire à travers Google Books (numerama.com)