The search item can be all sorts of things, including phonemes, prefixes, phrases, and letters.
Go to Google Books Ngram Viewer atbooks.google.com/ngrams.
key in any phrase or phrases you want to analyze.
Separate each phrase with a comma.
Google suggests, “Albert Einstein,Sherlock Holmes,Frankenstein” to get you started.
In NGram Viewer searches, items are case-sensitive, unlike in Google web searches.
Select a date range.
The default is 1800 to 2000.
Most users can ignore them and focus on the most recent corpora.
Set the smoothing level.
Smoothing refers to how smooth the graph is at the end.
The most accurate representation reflects a smoothing level of 0, but that setting may be difficult to read.
The default is set to 3.
In most cases, you don’t need to adjust it.
PressSearch lots of books.
Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, you’re able to drill down into the data.
In this case, you’d search forfish_VERB.
Google provides acomplete list of commandsother advanced documentation for use with Ngram Viewer on its website.
What Is Ngram Showing?
Google Books Ngram Viewer outputs a graph that represents the use of a particular phrase in books through time.
This is similar toGoogle Trends, only the search covers a longer period.
Case Study
Consider the case study of vinegar pies.
They’re mentioned in Laura Ingalls Wilder’sLittle House on the Prairieseries.
However, with a smoothing level of 3, you see a plateau over the mentions in the 1800s.
Probably only one book mentioned vinegar pie, and it was averaged to avoid a spike.
By setting the smoothing to 0, you could see that this is precisely the case.
The spike centers on 1869, and there’s another spike in 1897 and 1900.
