This run is limited to words in the titles of books. This data covers the 1,681,161 books that were published in English in the UK in the long nineteenth century, 1789-1914. We have normalized the data by making the charts relative–i.e., frequency of books with these words in the titles in each year–rather than simply using the absolute numbers of books with the words in the titles in each year. Aside from the first six words, the charts graph the data from zero to one percent of all books published in a year so that they are on the same scale and can be visually compared.
Multiple printings of a book in a single year have been collapsed into one “expression.” That is, the data has been partially FRBRized. One could argue that we should have accepted the accentuation of popular titles that went through many printings in a single year, but editions and printings in subsequent years do count as separate expressions. We did not go up to the level of “work” in the FRBR scale, which would have collapsed all expressions of a book into one data point.
Same scale (0-1%; some had wildly anomalous spikes for a year that were clipped at 1%)
city (clipped at 1%)
improvement (clipped at 1%)
liberty (clipped at 1%)
love (clipped at 1%)
religion (clipped at 1%)
revolution (clipped at 1%)