Metaglossia: The Translation World

I’ve just discovered an online time suck that is not only addictive to the language lover, but a source of writerly ideas. It’s the Google N-gram Viewer.

N-grams are drawn from a text or speech corpus that shows how the frequency of a word or phrase changes over time.

The corpus for the Google N-gram Viewer is a database of more than five million digitized books published between 1500 and 2008.

The GNV holds an intrinsic interest for me because I write about language, but it is also of value to me as a writer of historical fiction. It’s a means of catching anachronistic vocabulary in a story set in the past.

Another use of the GNV database–also of value to writers- is to get a notion of changes in cultural values as reflected in published materials.