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| The guides really dressed up back then! |
A good way to check the popularity of something is to count how often people talk about it or write about it, sort of like the trending hashtags on Twitter. If you want to see the trending over several decades, way before the Internet, then the best place to look for words would be in books! Google has indexed over 5 millions books going back a couple centuries and they have a really cool application called “Ngram” which lets you plot the frequency of usage of a word over a long period of time. To better grasp the concept, try the words
“war” and “peace”, or
“internet”, the graphs will be very obvious to understand.
