This table shows the most similar words to a given query word, for each year, in 4.8M pre-1923 books provided by the Hathi Trust Research Center. This collection is the open-access subset of the millions of digitized books held by the Hathi Trust.

We represent each word with the set of words that occur on the same pages as that word. We consider two words to be similar if these sets are similar, indicating that they occur in similar contexts. More similar words are shown in darker text. Years with no dark words probably have few instances of the query word.

Click or tap a word to highlight instances of that word (and words with similar prefixes). Click or tap again to reload a page focusing on that word.

Use this data with caution. These statistics are a good reflection of the language used in books selected by university libraries, but don't necessarily represent general usage. Digitization errors are frequent, and no attempt has been made to remove duplicate works.