Did anyone hear about this before? (click on the title above to get to the article)
So basically, in a nutshell, Google has created a database of 5 million or so digitized books and the main purpose is to find cultural trends in words/terms and how often they are used within a given period of time or when their use even came about. Now I am big enthusiast for language, culture and how the two evolve within time, so this is really interesting, though it only gives you numbers, the fun part is then researching or just seeing why and when certain words' use become prominent over time and whether that changes.
Here is my first try at it and this is what I got from the corpus English. Seeing the results and relating them to history is great! Like making historic events come to life :) I only used one word on each search but you can type in up to 5. Read the article too, it has some interesting facts.
Word: Housewife
Time period: Between 1850 and 2000 with smoothing of 50
(Click on the below link to get a better look at the graph)
Word: Hippie
Time Period: 1850 and 2000 with smoothing of 3
Result: Huge peak in 1960-1980’s…amazing!
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=hippie&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1850&year_end=2000
Word: Terrorism
Time Period: 1950 and 2005 with smoothing of 3
Results: What do you know, goes way up after the 9/11 attack and still going up…
Word: Israel
Time Period: 1800 and 2000 with smoothing of 10
Results: again, between 1940 and 1980 the use of the word is increasing as Israel occupies Palestine and decides to create a country for itself right there in 1948, along with the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Now try it yourself 
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