You can click on any word or phrase to see it -- in context -- in Google Books. You can also click on a number in the table to see the matching word in just that decade. If you are using certain browsers, words/decades that you have already seen will be highlighted in red.

It is strongly recommended that you adjust the settings for your browser so that the links to Google Books open in a new tab -- it's much easier to navigate that way. This should be the default option in Firefox and other browsers. To change your settings in Internet Explorer, click here.

IMPORTANT: You will soon notice that there appears to be a "mismatch" between the frequency data in our charts and what you see at the Google Books site, as you see the extracts from books. However, our data is exactly the same as what you would see if you did a search for an exact word or phrase in a particular dataset (e.g. British or American) via the Google n-grams interface.

The problem is that the n-grams frequency lists (either on our site or theirs, when you have selected a particular dataset) apply to just THAT ONE dataset. The book extracts, however, are from ALL Google Books (American, British, +/-fiction, +/- one million books, etc). As a result, you will almost always see more hits -- sometimes MANY more hits -- from the book extracts than from the n-grams frequency data

Unfortunately, there is no way around this mismatch -- this is the way that Google Books has things set up. So the bottom line is that our frequency data is the correct data, but that the books extracts are simply not limiting the results in the way they should.