Many false positives in early years due to 's' being written like 'f' and mistaken by the OCR software. Both the short and tall forms were used, but there seemed to have been some style preferences that led to the tall 's' being used at the beginning of a word, and small 's' at the end.<p>In handwriting or italic, the tall 's' was rather like the integral symbol, but when setting serifed font it looks pretty much like an 'f', but missing half or all the crossbar.
Does anyone else have a really hard time telling the difference between the green that's used for 'fuck', and the green that's used for 'tits'?<p>I don't think I'm suddenly going colour-blind but it strikes me as odd that google would pick two colours that are so close to each other for a graph that needs so few separate colours...
In first page of search results for 1650 - 1724 I saw 4 different words OCR'd as "shit": This, that, first, and shit.<p>"first" looks like "firft", but "This" and "that" look pretty standard.
Interesting to see how shit and piss diverged after WWII. I wonder what propelled shit's cultural ascent.<p>(<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=shit,piss&year_start=1850&year_end=1965&corpus=0&smoothing=3" rel="nofollow">http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=shit,piss&yea...</a>)
1800 was the year ... :)
<a href="http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=tits%2Cboobs%2Cbreasts&year_start=1650&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=9" rel="nofollow">http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=tits%2Cboobs%2Cbr...</a>