Google Books Ngram Viewer

[roddy]

Not sure of how much actual value this is, but perhaps fun to play with . . .

New (?) tool from Google, which will graph the frequency of a (simplified Chinese, for our purposes, although other languages are available) word in its Books corpus, from 1800 up to 2008.

Spike in use of the word 香港 in 1997.

The rise and fall of 民主

New technologies

Massive humour crash during the 1960s?

Some raw data is downloadable. Any other interesting graphs?

[rmpalpha]

How about 毛? There is a large spike in the 1960s and 1970s but not much after that.

[roddy]

It might look like it plummets, but only because it gets so damned high - look at Mao in comparison with Deng and Jiang - he still gets more mentions right up to the present day.

Here's one - the use of 她. And the changing fortunes of 我.

Or even just 的 - I assume that's the increase in the use of 白话 right there?

[gougou]

It's good to see that China has been getting much, much more harmonious!

[gato]

Here is a graph of 毛泽东, 邓小平, 江泽民, 胡锦涛, and 共产 from 1960 to 2010.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=%E6%AF%9B%E6%B3%BD%E4%B8%9C%2C%E9%82%93%E5%B0%8F%E5%B9%B3%2C%E6%B1%9F%E6%B3%BD%E6%B0%91%2C%E8%83%A1%E9%94%A6%E6%B6%9B%2C%E5%85%B1%E4%BA%A7&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=11&smoothing=3

毛泽东,邓小平,江泽民,胡锦涛,共产

Here are a few trends that one can see:

- two surges in mention of Mao, first in 1962-1968, then in 1987-1992 (with the sharpest increase in 1989)

- Mao was mentioned more than Communism from 1965-1973, and then from 1989 onwards

- from the early 1980s onwards, Communism has been mentioned less and less; now it's mentioned much less than Mao but still more than Deng, Jiang or Hu

- Deng started rising around 1972-ish, Jiang in 1986-ish, and Hu more gradually starting in about 1996

[gougou]

This is fun!

Modern Chinese history in one graph.

[rmpalpha]

Why is the curve so significantly different when only 毛 is used vs 毛泽东? When writing about Mao, is the full name always used?

[roddy]

毛 will pick up everything from 毛衣 to 毛病 to 毛豆.

[Brandon263]

This is fun!

Modern Chinese history in one graph.

LOL

[BertR]

幸福 has been more or less constant until the seventies. Afterwards it has really boomed, but since 1980 it has only been going down.