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Transition.
Ever wonder how popular a word or phrase or person or thing is over time? Well, wonder no more. Google recently released an incredible new tool that searches across millions of books published in the last 200 years and graphs a word or phrase’s popularity of time.
It is called ngram, and it is awesome.
Want to see how it works?
Here’s vampires vs. werewolves vs. zombies.
Want to track inventions?
Here’s telegraph vs. telephone vs. Internet.
Want to see if your slang matches the time?
Here’s mama vs. papa vs. mom vs. dad.
Authors?
Here’s Faulkner vs. Fitzgerald vs. Hemingway.
Preparation of the potato?
Here’s baked potatoes vs. mashed potatoes vs. french fries vs. potato chips.
Honestly, I could go on like this all day. And if you want to play along, link to your favorite ngrams in the comment section!
Those are excellent points, Peter.
Here's a Facebook page we made to share interesting ngrams:
https://www.facebook.com/nteresting.ngrams
There's some really cool ones there – check them out!
Combining Wordle.net with N-Grams, you can figure out which words in your manuscripts need to be cut, and which are common enough in the rest of historical literature to ignore.
The Writeup is here: https://philipisles.blogspot.com/2011/01/combining-ngrams-and-worldle.html