Note: these are the partial results for soft + NOUN in COHA. Another search (in another corpus) will of course yield different results, but the general concepts remain the same.

	WORD	1920s 2	1930s	1940s	1950s	1960s	1970s	1980s	1990s	2000s	SUB 3	TOT 4
1	SOFT DRINKS 1	5	20	31	39	60	42	38	27	32	65	294
2	SOFT MONEY		4						45	30	45	79
3	SOFT DRINK	6 5	8	10	16	20	16	23	10	5	33	114
4	SOFT VOICE	7	5	12	7	6	2	14	4	6	18	63

1. The rank-ordered list of words or phrases in the results set. Click on the word or phrase to see the "Keyword in Context" display, with all entries for this word or phrase in all decades.
2. These columns show the frequency of the word or phrase in each decade from the 1920s-2000s. If you have selected a particular century or register in Section 1 of the search interface, the selected columns will be highlighted in the results set.
3. If you have selected a particular decade (or set of decades) in Section 1 of the search interface, then this column will show the total number of hits for each word or phrase in the selected sections.
4. This shows the total number of hits for all decades (whether selected or not).
5. Click on this number to see the "Keyword in Context" display, with the entries for the selected word or phrase in the particular decade for this column.