The use of the word "quicksand" over time

[wysvp]

Folks,

I came across Google's "Ngram" program earlier today and was experimenting with a variety of words. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this tool, basically, it shows you the frequency of use of a word or phrase over time, based on all the books Google has scanned.

For instance, our favorite topic, "quicksand," looks like this:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ngrams/gra ... moothing=1

You will note the large peak of use towards the latter part of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s - probably due to such things as the literary use of quicksand in novels, the reports of quicksand as people "moved West" in the U.S., etc. You will also note an uptick from 2000 to 2008 - perhaps that can be partly atttributed to us??!!

I'd be curious what other folks thought about the use of this word over time.

Mike

[Fred588]

Folks,

I came across Google's "Ngram" program earlier today and was experimenting with a variety of words. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this tool, basically, it shows you the frequency of use of a word or phrase over time, based on all the books Google has scanned.

For instance, our favorite topic, "quicksand," looks like this:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ngrams/gra ... moothing=1

You will note the large peak of use towards the latter part of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s - probably due to such things as the literary use of quicksand in novels, the reports of quicksand as people "moved West" in the U.S., etc. You will also note an uptick from 2000 to 2008 - perhaps that can be partly atttributed to us??!!

I'd be curious what other folks thought about the use of this word over time.

Mike

First, its not clear from that page just how the "frequency of use of the word over time" is calculated. Obviously the term implies some measure or count per some unit of time, but what measures? Is it how many times the word appears in books published in a given year? Is it the fraction of the word quicksand relative to total words in a given year? Or what.

Second, the data base apparently consists of the books that Google has scanned, but what books are those?


Any interpretation must depend on knowledge of at least these facts.

[wysvp]

I was just thinking in the "social" sense, not in any quantitative sense.

However, since you asked, you can read about the data, how it was created, normalized, etc., here:

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ngrams/info

I still think the romanticized period of fiction in the late 1800s contributed to the large use of the word. IMHO.

Oh, and if you click on the links below the graph (the years in blue), you can see samples of the word as it appears in various scanned books.

Mike