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Mapping life and
death of words
By Rachel Ehrenberg
Within the quiet pages of books, words
are battling it out with a competitive
fierceness that rivals Wall Street’s. New
research examining the frequency of
words used in books over more than
200 years reveals the rise and demise
of various words through time and
how social, technological and political
change influence language.
An international team of scientists investigated word histories using
Google’s Ngram project, a database of
words in seven languages developed
from scanning and digitizing about
4 percent of the world’s texts. The
researchers mined books printed in
English, Spanish and Hebrew published
between 1800 and 2008, a corpus of
more than 10 million words.
There’s a marked increase in the death
rate of words that coincides with the
modern print era, the researchers found.
That trend intensified with the advent
of stricter publishing procedures, and
later computerized editing and spell-checking technologies, which led to the
extinction of various misspelled words
or less-popular synonyms.
Incorrect or nonstandard spellings
weren’t the only cause of word death.
Roentgenogram — which comes from
Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered
X-rays — faced competition from
radiogram and X-ray, which ultimately
triumphed, Joel Tenenbaum reported
February 28.
“Each of the words is competing to be
a monopoly on who gets to be the name,”
said Tenenbaum, of Boston University.
“Of, the, an — those are the blue chips
of words, like Microsoft.” Tenenbaum
conducted the research with Alexander
popular endorsement of the creation
of a national homeland for the Jewish
people. Hebrew had been primarily used
in religious texts but then surged as a
modern, spoken language.
Origins revealed by mapping paths
Modeling strategy can trace roots of widespread phenomena
on distance: Just as diagramming the
relationships among friends can yield
close or “coupled” people, even if they
live far apart, diagrams of relationships
among locations that consider the traffic between them can yield coupled
locations. Using such relationships,
Brockmann and his colleagues came up
with a way to compute paths that are in
effect the shortest between locations,
even if they are far apart geographically.
Once that path diagram is in hand, the
researchers can test whether various
starting points might be the root of the
branching, treelike spread of whatever
phenomenon is being studied. A clean,
circular diagram emerges when the correct root is identified, computer simulations reveal.
“Computer simulations
are among the most useful
tools in our armory,” says
Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard School
of Public Health who has
been tracing the origins of
last year’s E. coli outbreak
in Europe. Such simulations
are particularly helpful if
they work even with poor or
biased samples of data, he
says. s
R. BRUNE, C. THIEMANN, D. BROCKMANN
By Rachel Ehrenberg
Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, but uncovering the past can be just
as tricky. Now researchers have developed a method that looks backward and
may reveal where a widespread phenomenon originated, be it the outbreak
of a disease or the introduction of a new
technology.
Typically techniques for deriving the
origin of something rely on the notion
that whatever is spreading will take a
certain time to travel a certain distance.
But with planes, trains and automobiles,
geographic distance by itself is no lon-
ger a good predictor of arrival time, Dirk
Brockmann of Northwestern
The new method still relies
An open, circular diagram
(top) of the shortest paths
between locations can reveal
a disease or innovation’s origins. Incorrect locations yield
a messy burst (bottom).
