Distribution by year

Distribution by year

On this page, you can compare the chronological distribution of word forms frequencies in the main corpus. Enter the word forms or phrases (without quotes) that you want to compare into two fields, for example, прийти, придти, притти or так как, потому что, ибо, поскольку. Please note that graphs are made for word forms or word form chains, but not for lexemes. If necessary, you can add more words and word forms for comparison.

Set time limits, for example, from 1900 to 2000. Click the button Show and make a graph where each comparison element is represented by a line of its own color (see the legend in the upper right corner). Moving the mouse over any point on the line, you can see the relative word frequency for a certain year (ipm). Ipm is defined as the number of uses of a word per year divided by the volume of the corpus for that year, and multiplied by 1 million.

Smoothing allows you to see the general word usage trend rather than random frequency fluctuations. For example, a graph with 10 years smoothing shows an average word frequency including data from the previous and subsequent 5 years. To get accurate data for each year, set the smoothing to 0.

Click the link Show tables to see tables with absolute usage frequencies for each year. Click any link to view examples from the corpus. The table on the right shows the total number of words in all texts dated by a given year.

If a text was being created for more than one year (for example, in 1966-1970), the absolute frequency of any word from such a text is distributed in equal shares over the entire period (in this case, 1/5 for each year). In the tables, the frequencies for such periods are given in a separate line. On the graphs, the distribution and smoothing of frequencies is always calculated on the full chronological range of the main corpus (XVIII-XXI centuries). Users only see the part of the graph that corresponds to the specified period.

On the right, under the graph, is a link to Google Ngram Viewer, running on Google Books Russian-language text collection. NB: despite somewhat similar approaches, the RNC and Google Ngram Viewer use different formulas for calculating relative frequencies.