This week’s Distraction December is a great tool for those of you out there who are obsessed with words and languages. Have you ever wondered how much a word has been used over the years? When did the word gain popularity and when did it slide back into the annals of history? Now you can.

Google took to scanning and archiving all the books it could get its hands on a few years back. They indexed every word in every book they scanned. Due to some lawsuits here and there about the legality of what they were doing, the project has been put on hold. However, they put their indexed data online for free use and even built a simple interface to explore the data. The result is the Google Books Ngram Viewer (http://books.google.com/ngrams).

All you need to do is input a word or phrase (multiple words or phrases can be separated by commas to compare), choose the years to investigate, choose the language, and then press “Search Lots of Books”. Make sure to note the percentage indicating the frequency of the words. They’re deceptive on their own. For example, if you search “cowabunga” on its own, it looks like it gained a lot of popularity in recent years. But if you search “cowabunga” alongside “go in for sport” you’ll find that “go in for sport” has generally been a more common thing to say than “cowabunga” but in recent years they have switched places. Now think, when was the last time you said “cowabunga” and the last time you said “go in for sport”?