Google Ngram Viewer is one of the many digital tools that Google makes available to users, but unlike others such as Google Maps, Google Image or the “simple” research few know it and even fewer know how to use it and what it is for.
The premise is that Google Ngram Viewer is a tool dedicated to words , highly specialized and useful for those who work with words, especially online. Specifically, it helps to discover how the very use of words has changed over the years by scanning the books published over the years. To provide the results, Google Ngram Viewer uses a diagram that shows the evolution of the use of the term searched over time.
Google Ngram Viewer was born in December 2010 from a collaboration between Google and the Harvard University with the aim of providing a tool capable of measuring how often words are used and recur in books written between 1800 and 2019. To carry out this task Google used Google Books , the tool developed to allow the search for old books digitized or on the market.
How to search on Google Books Ngram Viewer ? First of all you need to access the tool, after which a box will appear in which to type the search, just like it happens when you do a common search on Google. When you enter phrases in the search box and enter, a graph is displayed showing how those phrases or words have appeared in the literature over the years and the results can be compared. The search shows both the words and the books that contain them (and it is also possible to search for the authors) and is divided by years: from 1800 to 1910, from 1911 to 2013, and then by two years: 2014-2015, 2016-2017 , 2018-2019.
By selecting the period, Google Ngram Viewer refers to a list of all texts and books that present those words or phrases used as search keywords. The graph displayed also shows the TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) as a percentage, i.e. the importance of the word present in a text in relation to other similar texts, and the frequency of use according to the historical period taken into consideration.
Google Ngram Viewer also allows you to narrow your search by selecting a single reference time frame, and to select your preferred language by choosing from: English, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish and Italian , in the more or less recent “versions”. To explain how its tool works, Google uses a practical example, obviously in English, using three different words or expressions: “nursery school”, “kindergarten” and “child care”, all variations on the theme, in English, of kindergarten or kindergarten.
The graph at that point shows the trends of the three expressions from 1960 to 2015 in our sample of books placed in Google Books written in English and published in the United States. The colored lines show in what percentage they are present in the texts, allowing you to see how the use of individual words or expressions has changed over time, increasing or decreasing depending on the historical period. It can thus be found that, for this specific example, the use of “child care” began to grow in the late 1960s, surpassing “nursery” school “around 1970 and then” kindergarten “around 1973. It reached the peak shortly after 1990, and has been steadily declining ever since.
The usefulness of Google Ngram Viewer is therefore also to suggest which terms are better to use in the drafting of a text and which ones to discard because they have now fallen into disuse or are used only in certain contexts. You can hover the pointer over a specific line of the graph to highlight one word rather than another, obscure the others in the graph and specify particular characters in the queries , search for inflections, search without distinction case-sensitive, search for particular parts of speech and of course add or delete words from certain expressions.
Being a very “technical” and specific digital tool, Google Ngram Viewer obviously requires some practice, but once you have mastered the basics it is possible to exploit it for many purposes that go beyond simple writing and range in marketing. This tool can also prove very useful for students and for those who work in editing, as well as satisfying the curiosity of lovers of reading and literature.
