Comments on: My Word

My Word

Miko — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 08:40:09 -0800

The Corpus of American Historical English is a searchable index of word usage in American printed material from 1810 to 2009. Powerful complex searches allow you to trace the appearance and evolution of words and phrases and even specific grammatical constructions, see trends in frequency, and plenty more. Start with the 5-Minute Tour.

By: knile

knile — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 08:44:22 -0800

What does it mean that the first word I looked up was "poop"?

By: jquinby

jquinby — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 08:59:55 -0800

I'm getting an error on that second link.

By: HuronBob

HuronBob — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:01:11 -0800

We may find this to be the answer to the frequent Meta discussions regarding words/phrases that folks object to as being some sort of -ist. Looking up some of the more recent problematic phrases/words is interesting. If nothing else, we'll have a common understanding as to where a word started and how its use has evolved.

By: rory

rory — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:02:16 -0800

Fantastic resource. Thanks, Miko!

By: Miko

Miko — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:03:48 -0800

It's helpful, HuronBob. I also find the restricted date search on Google Books really helpful for that too. jquinby, it's working for me. Not sure what the problem may be?

By: Skygazer

Skygazer — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:08:10 -0800

Second link: The page cannot be found http://corpus.byu.edu/mycoha/help/xerr.asp?e=x_sessionExpired

By: Skygazer

Skygazer — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:10:19 -0800

IOW: The second link needs to be accessed through the first link. It's at the bottom of the lower frame.

By: Miko

Miko — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:15:20 -0800

Ah, I see. Thanks Skygazer.

By: Devonian

Devonian — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:20:04 -0800

So, first use of the word "Internet" was in the 1840s, but there's no evidence of it in the 1980s? Hm.

By: ed

ed — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:21:37 -0800

After messing around a bit, I think the Corpus is fairly unehlpful for recent slang that has been around for a long while ("MILF" yields an improbably solitary citation, for instance), but if you think politically (or feed the engine some derogatory terms), there are some interesting results. One expects the use of "socialist" during the 1930s, when the Nazis came to power. But it's fascinating that the 1980s is the second most popular decade, when "socialist" was used under the Reagan era to refer to anything even remotely liberal. Also fascinating: "groovy" was cited in 1947 in Time. Years before "Orwellian" was first used (purportedly by this Corpus) in 1952. It's a fairly decent metric if you're too lazy to consult etymological texts, but hopefully they'll work out the kinks for greater precision over time.

By: Miko

Miko — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:25:07 -0800

I think the main problem is that even 400 million tezts is a little bit of a small sample when you compare it to all print material that has existed (every edition of every newspaper and magazine everywhere, every book, every piece of sheet music, etc.) But it's interesting and a good start. If you look at the section where this tool is compared to Google Books and some other corpora, it gives some sense of what this is good at and what the others are good at.

By: Miko

Miko — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:25:46 -0800

er, make that 400 million words of text

By: Skygazer

Skygazer — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:28:06 -0800

IOW: The second link needs to be accessed through the first link. It's at the bottom of the lower frame. Or check that. As long as you first access the first link, you can then, access the second link from the FPP. I'm not sure how that works. Some sort of ASP or frames or cookie (?) thinga-ma-jiggy. Some coder will be along now any minute to explain it, I'm sure and there's probably also a workaround, but again, I'll leave it to the expert(s).

By: rdr

rdr — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:42:15 -0800

I think that this is very interesting but I don't know that I'd rely on this corpus for tracking word popularity in the 1800's. For example I did two searches, the first for shoe, the second for sandal. There's an odd spike in the usage of the word shoe in the 1830's. It appears to be because of the inclusion of a single book, "Horse Shoe Robinson: A Tale of the Tory Ascendency", in the input data. "The Squire of Sandal-Side A Pastoral Romance" cause a similar spike in the usage of sandal in the 1880's. If I'm reading their site correctly the numbers are in usages per million words but I'm guessing that there aren't enough 19th century sources to prevent a single source from distorting the results. I'm sure that this corpus is meant to be used for answering questions that are much more sophisticated than asking how the frequency of using an individual word has changed over the last two centuries but that's what I naively jumped to.

By: Jehan

Jehan — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 09:56:57 -0800

An interesting resource, thanks. I thought I would see if words that we now consider to be from other dialects used to have more currency. I chose "arse" as a word typically associated with Commonwealth English, but not US English. However, I fear that there may be some mistakes in the transcriptions, which I'm sure are OCR: ...tends to prevent arse surplus stocks... Axe seems to be almost as popular as ax over the entire time, although it is consistently less popular by the mid 1900s. Many of the early occurrences of ax seem to be representations of "black" speech. Wank seems only to have appeared since the 1980s, sadly.

By: psylosyren

psylosyren — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:33:58 -0800

The evolution of the meaning and the frequency of use of the word "pussy" is quite interesting, turns out.

By: infini

infini — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 11:21:12 -0800

This has been a subject of interest ever since I stumbled onto "Made in America" by Bill Bryson. Now its all online - thanks, Miko!

By: Melismata

Melismata — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 11:57:17 -0800

If I had this growing up, I would have had all A's in school.

By: exlotuseater

exlotuseater — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:08:20 -0800

This is really cool, and when complemented with google ngram viewer, etymology dictionaries, the OED . . . I'm getting a little flushed, aren't I? Goodness, please excuse me. *dabs at brow*

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:23:15 -0800

Why the hell did " fart" hit such a peak in the 70s and then settle into a low plateau?

By: infini

infini — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:50:18 -0800

We were not counting beans on our plates back then.

By: jadepearl

jadepearl — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:56:42 -0800

All I know is that, "broke ass", is from 1971 while "broke-ass" got me a hit in 2002 & 2003.

By: ROU_Xenophobe

ROU_Xenophobe — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:26:52 -0800

Why the hell did " fart" hit such a peak in the 70s and then settle into a low plateau? He rode a blazing saddle, he wore a shining star...