Wednesday 17 August 2011

When did the great war become the first war?



Neatly blending the Long War theme and what Google's Ngram can tell us about Turkestan, my friend Tim Sherrat has, through his work on methods for harvesting data from Trove, produced a rather nice graph based on Australian newspaper articles to demonstrate when people started referring to the First War as the First World War rather than the Great War.





Interestingly, using Google's Ngram viewer one can see that the results are broadly similar for the English Corpus:











and for American English:











although the Brits were a little later to the piece:



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