Mini- Project Ngram Comparison

Poetic vs poetic

The words that I had wanted to compare was Poetic and poetic. I chose these words because I wanted to see how often this word was being use to describe various people ,if there was a relationship, and when the word began to gain traction.

Starting with my results on the graph, you don’t see much of a difference until about the mid-1830s where poetic, with a lowercase, is being used more often, about four times more often at which point, around 1883 it begins to  skyrocket and it is used 5x more than Poetic, with an uppercase. In 1838, Charles Dickens works such as “Oliver Twist” was written and it explains the reason for the increase in the use of that word during that time period. The skyrocket in the 1880s can be attributed to other famous works such as “King Solomon’s Mines”, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, and of course “Sherlock Holmes”.

Based on this research, you are able to infer that if a piece of work comes out during a certain year, that turns out to be a worldwide phenomenon, it will be searched more due to it being a cultural phenomenon, regardless of how brief a time. This represents a positive correlation and evident cause and effect between popularity and search terms. I believe that if a piece of poetry comes out in a few years that has the same impact on our generation this effect will be the same.

I believe that there is such a difference because poetic (lowercase) was used more as an adjective to describe the people who were living around that era. Looking at the data you are also able to tell that the word became more culturally acceptable and began to be used a lot more throughout this time period.