2010-12-21
Google recently made available a cool new tool called “Google Books Ngram Viewer.” Using data derived from their Google Books project, when you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a body of books over the selected years.
For instance, if you plug in the word “tax” for the years 1800 to 2010, you get the following graph:
On the other hand, the term “Internal Revenue Service” provides the following graph:
Presumably the IRS was formed at some time during the 1860s.
The term “foreign tax credit" for the period 1920 until 2008 provides:
The graph for “value added tax” from 1945 to 2008 is:
The graphs above have used the books in the “English” category. The same value added tax graph for American English is:
I am sure that there are many other interesting tax terms to put into Google ngrams.