Featured Post

My 15 Minute City

I am excited to announce the launch of a new project entitled, My 15 Minute City! This project will be a series of short videos providing a ...

Thursday, April 22, 2021

How often is the term 'walk' used in English?

"When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years."

Below are a few Ngrams plotting the frequency of the word 'walk" in the Google corpus called English(2019) during the period, 1830-2019. 

The first chart plots 'walk' in comparison to 'urban' and 'rural'.  It is evident that the word walk is a frequently occurring word in English.  'Walk' occurred more frequently than urban and rural in the periods 1830-1910, and then again after 2010. 


The second chart shows an inflection search on the word 'walk'.  According to Google, "An inflection is the modification of a word to represent various grammatical categories such as aspect, case, gender, mood, number, person, tense and voice. You can search for them by appending _INF to an ngram."  

The corpus today uses 'walked', 'walk', 'walking' and 'walks' in that order.  Interestingly, the predominance of 'walked' is new since 2000.  


The third chart disentangles 'walk' as a verb from 'walk' as a noun.  Walk is used as a verb more often throughout the entire period, and since 2000 more than twice as often as a verb than a noun.


Overall, the word 'walk' has occurred frequently in the English (2019) corpus since 1830.  Its usage dropped slowly from 1830 to about 1990, but since then the word has been used at a growing rate.  


No comments:

Post a Comment