Some of you may know that Google has been scanning books for the last few years and so far they have scanned approximately 15 million books or just a little over 10% of written accounts. Using a subsample of this amount, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel have created a database of over 500 billion words as printed throughout history and packaged their findings into the Ngram viewer from Google Labs.
By searching for any kind of keyword, you can see how often a certain word was used throughout history. Naturally, we took the Ngram Viewer for a spin with some obvious aquarium-related terminology just to see how prevalent aquarium lingo has been through the last century or more, including the word “aquarium”. Take a look at the selected Ngrams above and let us know if you see any neat patterns in the data, or whether you come up with some neat Ngrams of your own.
[via TED]
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