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• Position: Google - Ngram Viewer - Brief article

Did anyone write about "teenagers" in the 1700s? What's been written about more in the 20th century, "hip hop" or "punk rock"? A new tool from Google called Ngram Viewer can figure it all out. With a database of 500 billion words--of books published from 1500 to 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, and Russian--Google allows you to plug in a string of up to five words and create a graph that charts the word or phrase's use over time. Type in "women" and "men," and you'll see that the former was mentioned in books much less frequently until the early 1970s, when feminism gained a...