google ngram viewer

JS357

General

29 Dec 13

JS357

Joined: 29 Dec 08
Moves: 6788

29 Dec 13

Google on those three words and you get a tool for looking at the frequency of specific words in books from 1800 to 2000. More than one word can be graphed. For example, "liberty" and "security" are interesting because the graph shows that liberty was more frequently talked about in 1800 and for some time after, but security gets more mentions in recent history. How about "chess"?

sonhouse

Fast and Curious

slatington, pa, usa

Joined: 28 Dec 04
Moves: 53321

30 Dec 13

Originally posted by JS357
Google on those three words and you get a tool for looking at the frequency of specific words in books from 1800 to 2000. More than one word can be graphed. For example, "liberty" and "security" are interesting because the graph shows that liberty was more frequently talked about in 1800 and for some time after, but security gets more mentions in recent history. How about "chess"?

Would that be only the English language? I assume so, but did they take into account the fact we are pushing 8 billion population now? I would imagine, for instance, there are probably more English speakers in India than in the US. Just a guess. With such a large increase in population, it would seem to skew the results unless you factored that in.

darvlay

Joined: 05 Jan 04
Moves: 45179

30 Dec 13

Originally posted by sonhouse
I would imagine, for instance, there are probably more English speakers in India than in the US. Just a guess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population

Not a terrible guess but still only about a third.

A Unique Nickname

Joined: 10 Jan 08
Moves: 19047

30 Dec 13

Originally posted by sonhouse
Would that be only the English language? I assume so, but did they take into account the fact we are pushing 8 billion population now? I would imagine, for instance, there are probably more English speakers in India than in the US. Just a guess. With such a large increase in population, it would seem to skew the results unless you factored that in.

After spending 5 1/2 months in India I highly doubt that.

JS357

Joined: 29 Dec 08
Moves: 6788

30 Dec 13

1 edit

Originally posted by sonhouse
Would that be only the English language? I assume so, but did they take into account the fact we are pushing 8 billion population now? I would imagine, for instance, there are probably more English speakers in India than in the US. Just a guess. With such a large increase in population, it would seem to skew the results unless you factored that in.

Numerous language choices covering the majority of world population. I don't know the size of the corpus in each language.

https://books.google.com/ngrams

Eg, look up lebensraum in German.

~~Frank Burns~~

Great Big Stees

In Check

Joined: 12 Mar 04
Moves: 10441

30 Dec 13

1 edit

I checked the word chess. A big spike between 1800 - 1810 followed by a sharp drop. Then a fairly steady climb for the rest of the graph. Indicative of?

~~Frank Burns~~

Great Big Stees

In Check

Joined: 12 Mar 04
Moves: 10441

31 Dec 13

4 edits

Originally posted by sonhouse
I would imagine that there are probably more people who speak English properly and correctly in India than in the US. Just a guess.

There, I fixed it.
As a citizen of the US I offer this from my personal experience.
~P(for a day)