Words come and go, and now thanks to a new Google database of 500 billion words in 5.2 million books, you can chart the popularity of words in literature and other books going back hundreds of years. The database is can be accessed by scholars or anyone through a Google Labs project called the Google Books Ngram Viewer. You type in a word, and it charts the usage of that word over time. Naturally, I typed in "twitter", to see how that word has come in and out of vogue. The result is in the chart above, which shows the word gaining popularity from 1750 and peaking a little over a century ago around 1900. Then the word went into along decline until this decade when it started to shoot up again. The graph above is smoothed over, it doesn't really start to take off until 2006 (see unsmoothed graph) when Twitter was founded, and the word took on an entirely new meaning. Strangely, though, there was an uptick starting even before that around 2003. Maybe Jack Dorsey read it somewhere and it stuck in his mind.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/4lfCjI-YiYI/
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