REASEARCH: Ngram

My work-in-progress takes place in 1917 so I want to write authentically for the time period.  Which means I don't want to use words that weren't in use then.

Like, you know - Facebook.  Ha!  Okay so that's an easy one.  But there are other words that I really do have questions about. 

And oh thank heaven for Google's Ngram. Until 2 days ago I didn't know such a thing existed but now, thanks to Facebook and my friend Eileen Heyes, I'm all over it!  Ngram is a site where I can look up a word, give a time period, and search for this word in books.  When I do, I'll get a graph showing the results. Here is the graph with results for the word "skeedaddle".  

It's tiny, I know but I hope you can see that I typed  skeedaddle into the search window (just below the word Ngram viewer).  I also indicated what dates I was searching - 1800 - 2000.  (I have no idea what smoothing of 3 means. It was there and I didn't change it. More research for me!)

But anyway at the bottom of the image you can see the dates and yay!  Skeedaddle comes up high on the charts for 1917 time frame.

So my next move was to go to the bottom of the screen and click on the date I wanted to search.

 I clicked on 1895 - 1976 and voila! I got book titles with copyright dates listed.

Then I could click on one of those books and read the word in context.  I chose SIS WITHIN which was published in 1913.

The word skeedaddle is highlighted so I can see how it was used in 1913. (At least in this story.)  Of course now that I'm there I can read other parts of the book  And who knows what other goodies I might discover in the process. 

Okay - just wanted to share my little research discovery. Since I have more writing to do, I'm going to skeedaddle. Bye ya'll.