You may know that corpus means body. A corpus of literature means a body of literature and is mainly used to indicate the words in that literature.
There are many Corpus studies to compare changes in language and to study how often a word is used. I have been using a tool from Google (Ngram Viewer) to compare words and their change in usage over time. I think you might enjoy using this Ngram Viewer tool which gives instant results based on the books that Google has scanned into their Google Books servers.
First lets look at this link: I used it on the corpus of Google books from 1800 to the year 2000. This is an interesting visual comparison of the words meter and metre: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=meter%2Cmetre&cas...
The result is a graph that you can look at for the 200 years that are covered by the books that were analyzed.
Here I have done the same thing with the words dialog and dialogue: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dialog%2Cdialogue&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cdialog%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bdialog%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BDialog%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BDIALOG%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cdialogue%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bdialogue%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BDialogue%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BDIALOGUE%3B%2Cc0
You can change the two words at the top and create a graph for any two words you want to compare. They should be separated by a comma for this to work properly. you can also compare two or more comma separated phrases. Please have fun.
Here are the official instructions on how to use the Ngram viewer:https://books.google.com/ngrams/info
Comments
This looks very interesting to me. I'd love to use this tool to get as much information as possible. Thank you so much, Sir, for introducing it to us.
Thank you Rysperski and Ina,
It is a fun thing to work with and it is difficult to stop using it. there is always something else to compare. Maybe you noticed that it can be used for other languages too.
I just looked at potatoe and potato. There are so many words to check.
I never heard such thing before. Thanks for the info, Mr. Bob. I will try to study about it in depth.
Howdy, Mr. Bob,
Till now I led a simple and cosy style of life wasting away my time chinwagging in chat sites and caring little about the wordings I use, one could readily say..a typically pc potatoe life style.
But were I to enjoy this blissful state till the maggots devour me, of course NOT - there came a day that some Ngram Viewer was presented to my suspecting-nothing eyes.
Cutting the long tale short - I ended up sitting till the early hours of morning meandering between charts trying to satisfy my increasing hunger for information about words that I so happily used knowing little about them, except for their meaning.
THANKS A LOT, Mr. Bob!!!
Great work!
Thanks for sharing the useful "Ngram Viewer". Sorry, Google isn't available here in China. I hope other members here can make good use of it.