20 thoughts on “Ngram Faceoff: Girl and boy”

  1. Try doing it with the search terms capitalized, and you get a completely different chart. How odd. I wonder if there’s a way to make it non-case-sensitive.

  2. If you try it with men vs. women, you also get an interesting graph: http://bit.ly/fFp9ms.
    Note that ‘man or men’ is mentioned 8/9 times more than ‘woman or women’ in the 1800-1900 period.
    After that, it changes from twice as much around 1990 with the exception of ‘women’ which is briefly mentioned more than the others during the 1990-2000 period.

  3. All four of these terms at the same time: ‘boy,girl,man,woman’ provide an interesting four-trace graph.

  4. @maarten — What confounds the man results a bit is that “man” has more meanings, and therefore more uses, that “woman.” For instance, especially in older times, “man” often meant “mankind.” What’s more, “man” can be a verb — as in “man the barricades.” Of course, that more robust use is itself telling.

  5. dog vs cat.

    Cat has always been less popular but shows slow,continual growth over the last 200 years. Dog hit a low in 1980, but since 2000 has clearly broken out.

  6. I checked dog and cat too. Seems like men and dogs had a low period in the Martha Stewart years.

    I also checked guy and doll. Doll has a pretty strong showing in the 30’s and 40’s, but thankfully has dropped precipitously since then.

    I tried babe – but I couldn’t think of a counterpart.

  7. I thought it would be interesting to look at the use of communication words: conversation, dialogue, talk, chat, discussion, debate and social networking – http://goo.gl/xVBZd
    It seems despite the huge popularity of social media, social networking has some way to catch up!

    If you then filter for British English and then American English the results are quite different
    British English: discussion leads then talk, debate, conversation, dialogue, chat [http://goo.gl/LIOdz]
    American English: talk leads then discussion, conversation, debate, dialogue, chat [http://goo.gl/ixnhT]

  8. Tried “heaven,hell”– what’s not so interesting is that “heaven” was heavily used in 1800, compared to the rarely mentioned “hell.” However, by 2000– equal usage.

    Also tracked the popularity (or lack thereof) of my name. 2000 was the all-time high for literary Rachels… Whereas the husband’s “John” is back where it started in 1800 after high 20th century traffic.

    Thanks, Dan!

  9. I loved these graphs the minute I saw your first post. Since I’m a science teacher, I had to do “science and religion” since 1900. I can’t post the graph here, but maybe you can do it and show it. It’s pretty neat!

  10. lol … orange beats apple beats microsoft. In company brand name value it might be reverse order …

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