Grammar Girl here. Last year, around this time, I told you about a new word tool called

the Google Books End Gram Viewer that lets you see and compare how words and phrases have

been used over time. Now, I'm happy to tell you the details of an update Google just released

that makes the End Gram Viewer even better. The most exciting improvement in End Gram Viewer

2.0 is the ability to designate parts of speech. For example, people often complain about

the use of the word impact as a verb in business. Everyone agrees that impact can be a noun,

as in, Hurricane Sandy had a huge impact on the New York subway system. But when it's a

verb, some people hold to the rule that impact should only describe a collision or packing,

as in, scientists expect an asteroid to impact Earth. Some people don't like sentences,

such as, the weather will impact fourth quarter revenue. They say impact shouldn't be used that way,

and they complain that such uses of impact are new. Now, with Google End Gram Viewer 2.0,

you can get a hint of whether those people are right, because now you can search the database

and see how often impact appears in Google Books as a verb, and how often it appears as a noun.

You couldn't do that before. So when I do the search, it does indeed appear that people

started using impact as a verb more frequently starting around 1970. That doesn't tell us they're

using it as a verb the way people don't like, but it does show that it's popping up in books a

lot more often as a verb in general. Besides limiting your searches to words when they're only

one part of speech, or flanked by another part of speech, you can also search to see if your words

appear at the beginning of a sentence, or the end of a sentence. For example, my step sister

recently asked me a question that's perfect for this kind of search. She wanted to know whether

she should say something displayed in a ray of red, or in a ray of reds. I wasn't sure,

and I couldn't find anything in my usual usage guides, and when that happens, I often turn to a

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