Linguistic dark matter - culturomics

[Tom Zurinskas]

WOTY - "culturomics"

from http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/16/google-tool-english-cultural-trends?INTCMP=SRCH

How many words in the English language never make it into dictionaries? How has the nature of fame changed in the past 200 years? How do scientists and actors compare in their impact on popular culture?
These are just some of the questions that researchers and members of the public can now answer using a new online tool developed by Google with the help of scientists at Harvard University. The massive searchable database is being hailed as the key to a new era of research in the humanities, linguistics and social sciences that has been dubbed "culturomics".



Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL7+
see truespel.com phonetic spelling





>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Michael Quinion
> Organization: World Wide Words
> Subject: Linguistic dark matter
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Science reports on a massive searchable corpus created from some five
> million books, now available on Google: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
>
> One report is here: http://bit.ly/ffQCmR . It quotes the researchers:
>
> "We estimated that 52% of the English lexicon - the majority of words used
> in English books - consist of lexical 'dark matter' undocumented in
> standard references."
>
>
>
> --
> Michael Quinion
> Editor, World Wide Words
> Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org