ngram.com Explainer Video | made with ngram

About the video

This video was created by ngram to explain how google ngram viewer turns centuries of digitized books into interactive visualizations of language change. The explainer walks through the tool's interface at books.google.com/ngrams, showing how comma-separated search terms reveal how words, phrases, and cultural concepts have risen and fallen in popularity from 1500 to 2019. It covers practical techniques such as using wildcard searches with asterisks to surface top word associations, applying the "_INF" tag to capture every grammatical form of a term, and filtering results by fiction versus non-fiction or by language to compare global trends. Real-world examples illustrate how the tool can track spelling evolution over time and pinpoint when historical figures first entered public discourse. The video frames these capabilities as useful for researchers, educators, writers, and anyone curious about linguistic and cultural history, positioning google ngram viewer as a free, data-driven way to quantify shifts in human culture through its vast corpus of digitized literature. Throughout, the tutorial emphasizes clear, step-by-step guidance so viewers can apply these search techniques themselves, moving from simple queries to more advanced analytical approaches. The result is a structured walkthrough that translates an often-overlooked academic tool into an accessible resource for everyday research and content creation.