Confused about which phrase to use? Google Ngram Viewer to the rescue!

Have you ever found yourself staring at your writing, unsure whether the phrase you've chosen is the appropriate one?

While you can order a usage manual to consult, Google Ngram Viewer is a few clicks away and may be the niftiest tool I've seen for showing the popularity of words and phrases over time. But beware; if you geek out on technology like I do, this thing could have you happily distracted for hours.

What is Google Ngram Viewer?

Google Ngram Viewer scans the text of its database of books for the keywords and phrases you enter into its search bar. It then displays the results as a line chart.

So, if you want to know if it's more common to say "impact on," "impact for," or "impact in," you can enter these terms into the search bar and get a helpful line graph showing you the magnitude of difference between the three along with the overall popularity of each phrase.

Below you can see the results of my search:

Other uses for Google's Ngram Viewer

But the Ngram Viewer is not limited to identifying the most popular phrases in literature. It can also give you a feel for popular words, figures, and technologies over time. This is especially helpful when writing historical fiction to help you spot anachronisms in your writing.

For example, you may be writing a piece on the influence that books like Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes had on the ethics of science. You may wonder when these books first gained popularity or if they were still being discussed when Albert Einstein was around.

You could enter a search with these names in Ngram Viewer:

A line chart showing the results of Google Ngram Viewer's search for Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes, and Frankenstein.

You can see that Frankenstein far preceded the other two and that culturally, these books were discussed before Albert Einstein was born. He may have even read these as a youth!

Limitations of Google Ngram Viewer

If a word or phrase is found in less than 40 books, Ngram Viewer will not display results for it.

Pop culture

Because the search only includes published books that are present in its database and that are from the years 1500 to the present, Google Ngram Viewer does not reflect quickly changing trends in pop culture language.

Precision

Additionally, a term becomes popular before its significant use in print. So for historical evaluations, if a term doesn't appear on the Ngram Viewer, it doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't used; it just means it wasn't popular in the written word at the time.

Skew

Because Google includes scientific literature in its database, the results of the usage charts can be skewed.

More research is always helpful, but the Ngram Viewer can be a quick way to gauge trends throughout time and to understand current accepted use in the literary world.

Now, who wants to go play around with it?

Darn. I guess I'll have to remedy the lack of that phrase by writing a book!