Saturday, March 19, 2011

More fun with words

If you like to play with words, and I know you do, check out corpus.byu.edu. This is a linguist's dream. Search for a word and you can see how frequently it was used at ten year intervals from about 1800 to the present. You can also see how the word was used in context to see how meanings change. It's fascinating and fun.

The corpus also has a practical use for writers. Worried that a word you want to use sounds too old-fashioned or too modern? Want to make sure a word had the same meaning in the time when your story is set? This corpus, the brainchild of BYU Linguistics professor Mark Davies will give you much more info than most dictionaries can.

It really is a word lover's dream come true.

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