Google has released a massive, searchable database that will give linguists and historians a new tool for quantitatively understanding how language and culture have changed over time.
The Books Ngram Viewer, which was created by Google in association with the Encyclopedia Britannica, scientists from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a database of 500 billion words contained in 5.2 million books, which were published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian. This project took 4 years to complete and allows you to track the usage of specific words over time.
Are you using it? Do you find it useful?
We would be interested in hearing from you with your feedback on this tool. We are going to test it as well and will let you know what we think.
