Google tool lets you track word use over 500 years

Google Ngram Viewer is all but guaranteed to eat away at your precious time (or save you from the forced family togetherness of the holidays). The new tool allows you to punch in whatever words or phrases you want, graph their occurrences in publications over five centuries and browse the results using Google Books.

I tried it out using a hodge podge of words and phrases that are fairly commonplace in current events and pop culture discussion: the ever-present "pornography," "openly gay," "angry birds."

Since it also allows you to compare several words/phrases, I chose "zombies," "vampires" and "werewolves." (What? I watch a lot of horror movies.) As you can see in the graph above, vampires sucked more life out of zombies and vanquished their arch-enemy Lycans — chalk that up to Team Edward for carrying on Bram Stoker's tradition.

I was actually surprised to find that "pornography" really didn't pick up steam until after 1960. Before then, it's almost a flatline. For phrases or words to be tracked, they have to have appeared in 40 books/publications. Google reminds us that only about 500,000 books were published prior to the 19th century, but modern publishing doesn't necessarily skew the results. As Google explains on the Ngram FAQ, they "normalize by the number of books published in each year."


The 1960s sees the rise of "pornography" as a common term. From 1961's "Phoenix: the posthumous papers" by David Herbert Lawrence (yes, the D.H. of the highly controversial "Lady Chatterley's Lover"), pornography is mentioned several times.

Lately, with the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, it seems that finding "openly gay" is hot in stories and on social media feeds, but it's been around long enough, too. Looking back through the Ngram Viewer, the use of the phrase "openly gay" results in only 2 pages of results per 50-year increment from 1800 to about 1970, when the results jump to 11 pages. But this was also the beginning of the gay rights movement, Harvey Milk, and scores of other pioneers.