The English language is a living thing: words become
obsolete, others become popular, and new ones are created. We’re all aware of
this process, but have you ever thought to yourself, “I don’t remember using or
hearing that word very often, but now it seems to be everywhere overnight.”
Has the popularity of the word truly skyrocketed? Or were
you just not paying attention before?
With Google’s Ngram Viewer, you might be able to figure it
out. This nifty application—which really should come with a procrastination warning—uses
texts from Google Books to graph word usage over time. You can trace a single
word or phrase’s written frequency over time (hipsters got a lot of attention
in the 1960s and were all but ignored in the 1980s) or you can compare several
words (you’re unlikely to see either these days, but tell your friends that verily
was always more popular than forsooth).
Lexicographers, linguists, grammarians, and people who
simply like a good dictionary were all atwitter when the venerable Oxford
English Dictionary announced its decision to add a new definition of tweet: “to
submit
a post to the microblogging service known as Twitter.” (Ironically, microblog hasn't yet made the
cut.) The Ngram data set only goes back to 2008, so we can’t see the jump that
has almost certainly happened in the last five years and which prompted the OED to
break its own rule about only adding a word after ten years of documented popular usage.
Still, it was interesting to find out that tweet also experienced a heyday
around 1810 but that apparently no one had much to say about birds in the
1850s.
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