One of the great uses of the internet is to archive embarrassing wastes of time right? Whatever, I thought this was fun.
Like a lot of folks I wasted too much time playing with Google’s N-Grams over the winter holidays. I thought it might be interesting to plug in “color” and “colour” and then two hours later I had over 20 of these things.
I’m no expert on late nineteenth/early twentieth century Anglo-American history so I’m not going to weigh in on what any of these mean. I get the sense though that this is one of those experiments that, as @samplereality (i think) said, just confirms what we already knew. The English Empire declined and the 20th century was dominated by the USA. Or was it that there were more speakers (or rather writers) of American English in the 20th century (and is that actually part of the definition of domination)? Or is it that languages, if they aren’t dead, are very promiscuous? Or, is this all just proof that we need humanists to sort all this data out?
This humanist is tired so I’ll just stick this on the internet so you can check it out if you want.
Thanks to This very helpful website
