Resource post: Google Ngram
Thanks to anna_wing for this:
Google Books Ngram Viewer. If you want to know if X term was used in Y language (English, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Spanish, Russian) at Z time, you want this. Here is an explanation.
A word of caution: The results are all from ebooks or scans of older books. Google's OCR software is not very good at handling the extended S, or telling the difference between "k" and "h." This is responsible for the astonishing results for the word "fuck" in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Google Books Ngram Viewer. If you want to know if X term was used in Y language (English, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Spanish, Russian) at Z time, you want this. Here is an explanation.
A word of caution: The results are all from ebooks or scans of older books. Google's OCR software is not very good at handling the extended S, or telling the difference between "k" and "h." This is responsible for the astonishing results for the word "fuck" in the 17th and 18th centuries.