Which came first, orange the color or orange the fruit? And what’s a busman’s holiday? Martha and Grant talk about bumbershoots, brollies, nursery rhymes, and alternatives to the word unicycle. Plus, an app-inspired quiz, favorite...
The Google Books Corpus from Mark Davies at Brigham Young University tags words in Google Books with their parts of speech, so you can search how words really combine. For example, suitcase often follows battered, making battered suitcase a cliché...
Databases like the Google Books Corpus can also be used to follow text over time. For example, as the women’s suffrage movement grew around 1910, words relating to women’s rights grew in popularity and frequency of usage. This is part of...