You may never get through all 500 billion words from more than 5 million books over five centuries. But you can find out, for instance, that "smartphone" is a lot older than you think. Lance Whitney ...

Google never seems to stop surprising us with a constant stream of neat little projects that mine large datasets in interesting and unexpected ways. My topic today is yet another of these: Google’s ...

It's been nearly three years since Google rolled out its Ngram Viewer, allowing armchair historians to plot the trajectories of words and phrases over time based on an enormous corpus of data ...

The Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that provides data on the frequency of words in a corpus of more than eight million books. In a 2011 publication, the search engine’s ...

Google launched its Google Books Ngram Viewer this week, a tool that lets you research how popular words and phrases have been over several centuries, based on their appearance in books. But can you ...

At age 14, I began reading my first Shakespeare play—Romeo and Juliet—for English class. It only took a line or two before my first profound, literary thought began to percolate: “This is English?!” ...