This is the kind of analysis we had in mind when we made this data available. The notion that "make sense", for example, is a neologistic phrase, is very interesting.
The Google Books Ngram Viewer (http://books.google.com/ngrams) lets you graph and compare phrases from 5.2 million books (that's half a trillion words!) digitized by the Google Books team over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years.
Recently one digital humanities researcher turned to the Ngram Viewer to answer a question that's piqued the interest of many a pop-culture fan lately: just how historically accurate is the dialogue of Downton Abbey, anyway?
Read more on what he found:
Recently one digital humanities researcher turned to the Ngram Viewer to answer a question that's piqued the interest of many a pop-culture fan lately: just how historically accurate is the dialogue of Downton Abbey, anyway?
Read more on what he found:
Sapping Attention: Making Downton more traditional
James Gray - 2012-03-23 23:48:05-0400
I just did a simple ngram check of the term "physical reality" vs. a term a friend was using that may have convinced him to "physical reality" in the book he is writing.