What Objects Authors Used For Size Comparisons In The 1800s And Now, Charted
When Hans Christian Andersen published The Princess and the Pea in 1835, he may have unwittingly been part of the 1800s zeitgeist: talking about the size of peas.
According to a fascinating chart created by Colin Morris, peas were by far the favorite reference point for authors looking to describe an object's size. Pulling the phrase "the size of ___" from Google Books' Ngram dataset, Morris looked at the most common items authors used in the 1800s compared to those authors used from 2000 to 2008:
While "pea" and runner-up "walnut" have lost ground, they're still the most popular reference points. Meanwhile, some words have ended up casualties or products of time. For instance:
- Sixpence, shilling and crown piece coins were no longer in use in the early 2000s, but were widely in use in English-speaking (and writing) countries in the 1800s;
- Credit cards did not exist in the 1800s;
- Quarters and dimes were available in the 1800s, but we'd guess that compared to the 1800s, American literature (and thus American currency) is far more heavily represented in the 2000s;
- Basketball was first played in 1891, leaving little time for the basketball itself to enter the lexicon.
Interestingly, writers in the 1800s were far more into nature, with 16 of the top 22 words being an animal or a food, while only 5 of 22 were in the 2000s. We're not going to try to read too much into that, but if you want to try to relate it to the after-effects of the Industrial Revolution, be our guest.
[Colin Morris via Reddit]
