grammar girl here. This week quick and dirty tips launched a new podcast called

the Tech Talker, so we're all doing tech-themed topics to show our support. And I'm

glad we are because I get to tell you about a new tool from Google Books that I've

been using called the N-gram viewer that I probably wouldn't have mentioned

otherwise. The N-gram viewer lets you search the Google Books Corpus. In this

context, Corpus is just a fancy word for a collection of writings, but the

Google Books Corpus might deserve a fancy word because it's huge. It contains

155 billion words. And the N-gram viewer lets you search those words. And then it

makes graphs of how often your search terms appeared over time, starting

around 1800. Among other things, I've used it to see that printed materials have

included the word shot in friday, more often in recent years, and that wet

your whistle W-E-T is a much more common in print than wet your whistle W-H-E-T,

even though the Oxford English Dictionary lists both options. It can be a

little addictive once you start playing with it. I find myself thinking, well

sure, people say gone missing is a new phrase that's driving them crazy, but is

it really so new and is it really increasing? Or when did graduated college start

showing up in print instead of graduated from college? These questions seem a

lot easier to answer once you can search a Corpus. The Google Books Corpus is

by no means the only Corpus on the web, but from what I've seen, it has the

simplest interface, which makes it easier for beginners to use. However, it's

simplicity and the way it was made means that it also has some important

limitations. The first thing to keep in mind while searching is that English has

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