Lexical Explorer
Word frequency over time — Google Books Ngrams
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data: google books ngrams corpus (english, 1800–2019) — values are relative frequency — proxy hosted on render.com
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Factor Explorer

Each factor captures a shared dynamic pattern across thousands of words. Select a factor to see its trajectory and the words that load most strongly onto it. Click any word chip to explore it in the word explorer.

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Dynamic Word Map

Words positioned by their Factor 1 × Factor 2 loading — revealing clusters of shared linguistic dynamics, not semantic similarity. Colored by dominant regime. Click any word to explore it.

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Emerging Word Predictor

Using dynamics visible up to year 1995, the model predicts which words are about to surge over the next 5 years. Slide to any year and reveal what actually happened.

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Cultural Shift Detector

Detects periods of cultural change purely from linguistic signals — without being told anything about history.
ShiftScore = z(LII) + z(changepoint density). High values = the language system is under stress.

ShiftScore timeline

Shaded regions = known historical events. Peaks show where our system detects cultural upheaval.

LII z-score

changepoint density z-score

Shift type classification

Each year classified by the pattern of its LII and changepoint signals.

Event detection results

Did the system detect each known historical event?

Feature importances (supervised model)

Detected cultural shift peaks

Years where ShiftScore > 1.5 (strong signal)