I’ve been having a bit more fun with the Google Ngram Viewer (previously). A reminder that these graphs show how much these phrases have appeared in published works over time. They are case-sensitive and I’ve used the English corpus.
The Americanisation of English
A few days ago Google launched the Google Books Ngram Viewer, a labs project that lets you compare the frequency of word use in published works, and compare these terms over time. For example, the following is a variety of common first names appearing in the English database over the last two hundred years.
Common English first names
You can see that around 1960, the name David suddenly started to gain in popularity. You can narrow the English corpus to American English, British English and English fiction, and also search works in other languages.
halfblog.net 