Software for Data & Digital Scholarship

Google Ngram Viewer displays user-selected words or phrases (ngrams) in a graph that shows how those phrases have occurred in a corpus. Google Ngram Viewer's corpus is made up of the scanned books available in Google Books. Typically, the X axis shows the year in which works from the corpus were published, and the Y axis shows the frequency with which the ngrams appear throughout the corpus. Users input the ngrams and then can select case sensitivity, a date range, language of the corpus, and smoothing. 

• Google Ngram Viewer documentation
• Resources
  • Marziah Karch, How to Use the 'Ngram Viewer' Tool in Google Books
  • Ryan Patrick Welch, An Experiment with Google Ngram Viewer

1. Enter the ngrams you wish to visualize into the search box on the Google Ngram Viewer homepage and separate them using commas. Select the box for case insensitivity if you wish. You can enter a year range, select a corpus from the dropdown menu, and the amount of smoothing you prefer. Click search lots of books when done.

2. Your ngrams will display on the graph. If you hover over the line(s), you will see the frequency with which that ngram was found in the corpus for the corresponding year on the X axis.

3. You can search within the Google Books corpus for your selected ngrams using the links provided. The corpus is divided by years. You will be redirected to a Google Books results page. Each book listed will show you where the ngram is found within that book and its surrounding context.

4. You are able to tweet the visualization or export it and embed it on a webpage using an iframe.