This website allows you to quickly and easily search more than 100 million words of text of American English from 1923 to the present, as found in TIME magazine.   You can see how words, phrases and grammatical constructions have increased or decreased in frequency and see how words have changed meaning over time. The corpus is related to other large corpora of English that we have created.

The following are just a small sample of an unlimited number of queries, but they should give you some idea of what the corpus can do. As you click on the links below, pay attention to how the search form has been filled out, and then feel free to modify the search form to find what you are interested in.

• The overall frequency over time of words and phrases that were related to changes in society and culture, or historical events, such as flapper* (flapper, flappers, flapperdom, etc), cinemaddict*, fascist*, rocket*, reds, hippy/hippies, impeach*, new age, political* correct*, e(-)mail, and global warming.

• Changes in the language itself, such as the rise and fall of words and phrases like far-out, famed, wangle, funky, beauteous, nifty, or freak out. You can also search for changes with grammatical constructions like end up V-ing, going to V, phrasal verbs with up (e.g. make up, show up), the use of whom, and the use of preposition stranding (e.g. someone to talk with).

• Parts of words (which show how word roots, prefixes, and suffixes are being used over time in other words), such as -heart- (compare earlier and later), -home-, counter-, -dom (compare earlier and later), -aholic (e.g. chocoholic), and -gate in the 1990s (e.g. Monicagate).

• You can also have the corpus generate a list of words that were used more in one period than another, even when you don't know what the specified words might be. For example, you can find nouns whose usage increased a lot in the 1960s, verbs that drop off in usage after the 1930s, or adjectives that have been used much more since 2000 than previously.

• The corpus can also help to show how the meaning of words have changed over time, by looking at changes in collocates (co-occurring words). For example, the collocates of chip, engine, or web have changed recently, due to changes in technology. Notice also how this can signal cultural changes over time, such as adjectives used with wife in the 1920s-1930s (which might now be politically incorrect), or adjectives with families (earlier vs later).