According to Wikipedia, the Google Ngram Viewer "is a phrase-usage graphing tool developed by Jon Orwant and Will Brockman of Google, and charts the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations) or words and phrases, as found in over 5.2 million books digitized by Google Inc (up to 2008)" [1].
Researchers have noted a variety of interesting things from such data (which can all be downloaded here: http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html).
The purpose of this post is to use the frequencies of certain terms as a proxy for how popular, common, or concerning they (or the things they represent) are (with the assumption that books reflect popular sentiment).
The terms used for each graph appear above it, and the link to replicate the graph appears below it.
misogyny, misandry, misanthropy, gynocentric, androcentric
antifeminism+Antifeminism+anti-feminism+Anti-feminism+Anti-Feminism, antifeminist+Antifeminist+anti-feminist+Anti-feminist+Anti-Feminist, feminism+Feminism, feminist+Feminist
On Google Ngrams
prolife, pro-life, prochoice, pro-choice, antichoice, anti-choice, proabortion, pro-abortion
On Google Ngrams
single father+(single fatherhood), single mother+(single motherhood), single parent+(single parenthood)
On Google Ngrams
housewife, housespouse, househusband
On Google Ngrams
_PRON_ * married_VERB [PRON = pronoun]
On Google Ngrams
_PRON_ * marry_VERB
On Google Ngrams
_PRON_ * divorced_VERB
On Google Ngrams
_PRON_ * divorce_VERB
On Google Ngrams
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It is difficult to control the context of words when graphing them in the Ngram Viewer - in general, it is advisable to take the graphs with a grain of salt. I'm working on improving the quality of the graphs.
That said, the trends in the graphs presented here do seem to reflect overall trends in society.
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[1] "Google Ngram Viewer." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 17 Jan. 2014. Web. 12 Feb. 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer
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