Importance of words...

[Ed Davidson]

Just came across a Google tool (Books Ngram Viewer) that displays a graph showing relative frequency of words and phrases occurring in a "corpus of books" (e.g., American English, British English, French, etc...) over a selected period of time.

Here's a fun exercise - the first graph is an analysis of "wood art" "wood craft" "wood working" and "wood turning" from 1880 through 2008. The second graph is an analysis of "wood turning" versus "woodturning" over the same period. What conclusions do you draw?

 

[Jake Debski]

Wood working and Wood turning reached their peak usage during the "Craftsman" era. Wood turning peaked again prior and during the Second World War.

Wood art has been pretty much flat lined during much of the century.

Woodturning and wood art have gained traction and are on the rise since the founding of the AAW.

 

[Stuart Johnson]

It's interesting when doing a search like Ed's at the bottom is a listing by year groups. When you click on a group it pulls up a Google page showing all a listing of the publications. One I pulled up show an article from about 1908. In it was a reference about young ladies learning woodturning at several schools.

 

[Bill Boehme]

What I see in the first chart is that woodworking and woodturning were both much more thriving industries a century ago than today.

In the second chart, it seems that the term wood turning was a casualty of the stock market crash of 1927 -- struggled to make a comeback, but was finally overtaken by the combined word "woodturning".