Google Ngram Viewer: spot historic trends by analyzing 5 million books
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I just watched this [url=http://wimp.com/learnedbooks/]TED Talk on wimp.com[/url] and I immediately went over to [url]http://books.google.com/ngrams/[/url] to check it out.
Basically it's a statistics tool for all the books Google digitized, allowing you to look at how often words were used in our written history over time.
Lots of interesting stuff, like the trend of the words [url=http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=train%2Ccar%2Cairplane&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3]train, car and airplane[/url], the [url=http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Soviet&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3]rise and fall of the Soviet empire[/url], the fact that [url=http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Mario%2CLuigi&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3]Luigi was more popular than Mario for quite a while[/url] ( :v: ), or the brief popularity of the term [url=http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=videogame&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3]'videogame' at the start of the 1900s[/url] (EDIT: scratch that, it seems that they put all undated books at the start of the 1900s or something)? It's fun to mess with.
