Testing Google Ngram

Google’s new data-visualization tool Ngram Viewer searches datasets of 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian and Spanish to tell how frequently selected words or phrases have appeared from year to year.

Wanting to put this tool through its faanish paces I searched “sci-fi” but got zero hits. So I tried searching for the name of the most famous fan of all time, “Forry Ackerman.” There were lots and lots of references to Forry, all when and where you’d expect them to be – nothing requiring any analysis.

That changed when I searched for “fanzine”. A little blip right at the beginning of the graph showed an occurrence of the word around the year 1810. What was this? Evidence of time travel? Or maybe someone once coined “fanzine” as a technical term, long since forgotten? Patrick O’Brien readers know what a vast, specialized vocabulary there is for sailing ships alone and every other line of work presumably had its own.

Ngram Viewer allowed me to drill down to the page where it found “fanzine” – a page from a 19th century edition of Plutarch’s Lives. And no, Plutarch had nothing to say about fanzines. What Ngram Viewer actually had found was “Fanguine,” which is the word “sanguine” rendered in the typography of the time when the character used for the letter “s” sometimes resembled the letter “f”.

Can you come up with your own creative uses for Ngram Viewer? I look forward to hearing your stories.

2 thoughts on “Testing Google Ngram

  1. the typography of the time when the character used for the letter “s” sometimes resembled the letter “f”.

    Back in college during the 1970’s, I was looking thru volumes of a mid-19th century magazine and came across the account of a vampire killed in Eastern Europe. The articles explained that vampires preyed on thir victims by “fucking out their blood”. Oh, you writers of vampire romances, you Johnny-come-latelys.

  2. Try searching for sci-fi as: sci – fi (i.e., a space before and after -)

    LASFS gets quite a few hits, however many of those are when the text is not well scanned and the word is really “lasts”.

    Lots of way to waste time!

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