This is pretty freaking cool. Using books Google has scanned, researchers took sets of words and the dates they were used. What you get from that is a frequency of use that can be really fascinating.

This is one of the first I looked up.

I also spent some time looking up Zombies and found they first appeared in the 1800s. From there I also learned that Ghouls are also flesh-eating undead, so I threw them into the search as well. (Also Voodoo seems to be credited with the concept of zombies, so thats in the search as well) vampire,Zombie,Voodoo,Ghoul,Undead


You can read more on the subject at their site: http://www.culturomics.org/

Also if you have reddit, upvote!
It's not me, so I'm not trying to Karma whore it!

Oh also, it's case sensitive.

cowbell ...I'm guessing the two bumps in this one are completely unrelated.

Glad you noticed this, I was about to point it out because your first one is much more interesting with all lower case (plus much higher frequency).

Yeah I agree, but I liked how clearly you could see the increase of ships when it was capitalized. Hopefully they add a way to combine both results.

thought this was interesting

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=image%2C+sound&year_start=1920&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=orgasm&year_start=1920&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

yet another thing that affirms the superiority of the 70s

Actually, interesting...

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=penis%2Cvagina&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Didn't you know? Vaginas were all the rage in the 1880s.

Hey look, society's getting less narcissistic

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=I%2C+me&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

More likely that's just a result of 3rd person taking over as the dominant viewpoint in modern literature.

the only thing i looked up was penis and vagina...

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=fun%2Cfunny%2Camusement%2C+game&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

I'm interested why there's a spike for "fun" since, as far as I can tell, it's retained mostly the modern-day meanings since around the early 1700s.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=robot&year_start=1700&year_end=1850&corpus=0&smoothing=3

The earlier appearances of them are kinda cool :O

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=lol%2Cwat&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Wow
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=spiffy%2Cswank&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Get the hell out you aussies

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=boners&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

They got kind of popular in the 40's.

It should be noted that in the early eighteen hundreds, the typographical 'S' looked enough like the typographical 'F' to confuse the Google system.

Hence the randomly huge spike in the 'F' word around 1800.