Ngram Viewer

Something I've been playing on entirely too much (instead of doing work) is Google's Ngram viewer. What this does is lets you compare words from the corpus of your choice (i.e., search millions of books) over the past 200 years. You can choose the corpus of American English or British English, and I've found the differences to be fairly interesting. For example, in American English, we spell the word "color," while the British spell it "colour." The results are too wide to post here (but you can see the whole chart here). I've posted the relevant section below in Figure 1:

 

Figure 1. Colour (red line) versus color (blue line) in American English.

The red line represents use of the spelling "colour," while the blue is the now standard American English "color." We can see that previous to, say, around 1845, "colour" was the more dominant spelling in American English. After that, it changed over to without the "u."

Another one I tried was the difference between "math" and "maths" in British English. As some of you might be aware, the British generally shorten the word "mathematics" to "maths." I've had it explained to me that they do this because mathematics ends in an "s" and so must obviously be plural (like in "physics," "linguistics," or "Christmas," hey, wait a second...). How long has this been the case? I got the following results here and posted the relevant section to Figure 2.

  

Figure 2. Maths (red line) versus math (blue line) in British English.

Two things are of interest here. First, previous to the 1970s or so, there wasn't a lot of usage of either word in writing, but in general math was the preferred form of the two. Then "maths" overtook "math" as the standard form around the 1970s (around when people became confused about how plurals work).

You can also use the Ngram viewer to test for other languages, though I couldn't think of as many interesting queries. I decided to try the words "escoger" and "elegir" in Spanish. They both basically mean "to choose," only that "elegir" is preferred in Latin America since "escoger" sounds a little bit like an obscenity in their dialect (at least this was the case when I lived in Argentina). The results (found here) do show that, in general, "elegir" has been the preferred word over time.

I've done some other ones I found to be fairly fun. Like soccer versus football in British English, or cricket versus baseball in American English. I know the later two aren't synonyms, but the chart is still interesting because you can see pretty much the exact point when baseball overtook cricket in popularity in the United States.

And with that raise of the finger, cricket in America was given out for a duck.

So check it out and have fun with it. If you find anything interesting, feel free to share it with others in the comments section.