Google Unveils the Fabulous Ngram Viewer

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.

Google has just put online perhaps the greatest timewaster in the history of the internet. For a certain kind of person, that is. Which I know many of you are.

It’s the Ngram Viewer, which lets you graph and compare phrases over time, “showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years.” (Ngram is not a very small weight, it’s a techie term for a sequence of letters. A digram is two letters, a trigram is three letters, and an ngram is a sequence of any length. UPDATE: Actually, ngrams can be sequences of letters or words, and word ngrams are more common. Google’s reference is probably to word ngrams.) The dataset consists of 500 billion words from 5.2 million books scanned as part of the Google Books project. For example, here’s a chart showing usage of data is vs. data are over the past century:

As you can see, data are reached a peak in the early 80s and then began a precipitous nosedive. By the mid-aughts, I’m delighted to report, data is was nearly as widely used and looks to be on course to overtake the obnoxious data are sometime in the next decade. Hooray! (As you’ve probably guessed, I’m a longtime proponent of data is as the proper modern usage.)

Anyway, I’m sure you can immediately see the potential here for timewasting disguised as scholarly research. Go ahead and give it your best shot.

PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

payment methods

PLEASE—BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things it doesn’t like—which is most things that are true.

We’ll say it loud and clear: At Mother Jones, no one gets to tell us what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please do your part and help us reach our $150,000 membership goal by May 31.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate