N-Gram: What does it do?

So what is N-gram? At first I thought it was going to be a version of instagram, but that is very much not the case.It actually took me some time to wrap my head around this tool because although its a search engine, its a search engine format I’m not use to. The Google N-gram viewer is actually a search engine that does quick inquiries into the usage of small sets of phrases or words. You cant look up an entire quote from a book. It charts the frequencies of these strings of words using a yearly count of n-grams found in sources printed between 1500 and 2008 in Google’s text corpora in various languages. An n-gram itself is any sequence of items- words- of length n; so a 2-gram would be any word pair, a 3-gram a three word pair and so on.

At first, being someone who does not typically delve into statistics frequently, I did not see the point of using this tool. But reading more into it, I can see that its used to look up when certain words and phrases started to take rise. Pinpointing when phrases and words started to be used can be useful when perhaps trying to create a timeline for them. And its interesting overall to take note of this when you want to see a point of origin for certain phrases or words. Knowing roots for them can lead to a better understanding for why it was used at whatever time they were popular or not popular. Why are certain phrases more popular? Why did people stop using certain phrases around a certain time? It can narrow down your search to look for certain works that contain the words and phrases you seek to a specific time period.

And its also very interesting to note the difference of use of certain words and phrases in different languages. I haven’t given thought to how works in different languages use certain words and languages. Theres also not just one set way of saying certain things. For example the words kindergarten, child care and nursery school. Google Ngram provides this as an example graph. The graph compares the three phrases which ultimately mean the same thing but not one is just universally used. The phrases have different timelines of use throughout the years.

The showing of the trends in these ngrams are pretty eye opening.

https://books.google.com/ngrams