A fun research tool I've been enjoying lately: Google's Ngram Viewer, aka, your easy way to quantifiably nerd out about history and language. Did you ever want to quantify the frequency of a term in historic publications over time, in order to analyze the changing use of specific words and phrases? Precisely!
Use of the words "ok" and "okay" in works published between 1700 and 2000 (which have been scanned into Google Books):
Obviously we still need to consider context while enjoying the math. (There's even a convenient 'search on Google Books' links below the graph!) Take the word "bloomer". We're not going to see it before Amelia Bloomer starts writing about reform dress in the early 1850s, right?
It turns out that, before the term came to be associated with short dresses worn over trousers, "Bloomer" referred to flowering plants, as well as being a surname.
Seriously: click the link, enter your preferred year range (the sample size does get larger for later years), and search your favorite words/phrases.
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