How to Use Google Ngram Viewer While Proofreading

Google offers many tools that a proofreader or editor can use. One of the most underappreciated is the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which you can use to see how common certain words are.

So, how does the Ngram Viewer work? And how can you use it while proofreading and editing?

What Is an N-gram?

An n-gram, in basic terms, is a statistical analysis of how frequently something, such as a word or phrase, appears in writing or speech. N-grams help you understand patterns and connections between words. By looking at them, you can learn about popular phrases, find mistakes, and make sure your writing is consistent.

What Is the Google Ngram Viewer?

Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that allows you to see how frequently certain words or phrases have appeared over a specified period. When you input a word or phrase, Google Ngram Viewer will generate a graph. If you input more than one word or phrase, each one will be represented by a color-coded line, allowing you to compare them side-by-side.

The tool provides a quick and easy way to see how the usage and popularity of a word or phrase have changed over time. This makes it useful for linguistic research, language analysis, and cultural studies. And of course, proofreaders and editors.

How Does Google Ngram Viewer Work?

Google Ngram Viewer works by analyzing the Google Books database. For instance, if you search for usable and useable you can see that the former is much more common in the archived texts. It also shows you how the use of these spellings has changed over the years.

Google’s Ngram Viewer (Usable vs. Useable)

By creating an n-gram you can:

• See which spelling is considered standard between two variants
• Check whether a variant spelling is still used in modern English
• Compare the use of words and spellings in British and American English
• Check whether a term is typically capitalized (e.g., Brownian motion vs. brownian motion)

In other words, the Ngram Viewer is a handy reference tool for editors and proofreaders.

How to Use Google Ngrams Viewer in Google Books

To generate an n-gram in the Google Ngram viewer:

• Go to the Ngram Viewer webpage
• Enter the terms you want to compare, separated by a comma (if you’re not concerned about capitalization, make sure to select the case-insensitive checkbox)
• If required, select the dates you want to check between (the default is 1800‒2008) and the corpus you want to check (e.g., English, British English, American English)
• Hit search lots of books to produce a graph featuring your selected terms

You can also adjust the smoothing option before searching, but this only affects the presentation of the graph. The default setting is fine for most searches.

Are N-grams Good for Proofreaders and Editors?

N-grams are a very useful tool for proofreaders and editors. Google Ngram Viewer creates a clear, visual representation of how particular words and phrases are typically used, making it easier to spot any unusual word combinations, outdated language, grammatical errors, or spelling errors. 

Is Google’s Ngram Viewer Accurate?

Before we leave you, we should raise a note of caution: Google’s Ngram Viewer is a useful tool, but it isn’t perfect! It only looks at published books, with an emphasis on scientific literature, so its results won’t perfectly reflect how people use words in the real world.

Also, clients may choose to use a non-standard spelling sometimes. And unless that causes any problems with clarity in a document, the variant spelling may be fine as it is.

Most of the time, if you feel that an author is using an unusual spelling, it is better to leave a comment noting the potential problem. You can even use a link to the relevant n-gram to show your client why they may want to use the standard spelling. 

Ngram Viewer is not definitive. So, remember to use your judgement when checking spelling.

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When Alright and Anymore Aren’t All Right Any More Editing Tips: What to Do with Biased Language Literally and Figuratively: What’s the Difference? The Etymology of ‘Proofreading’