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Long‐term changes in the usage of climate and weather words

Climate scientists have long been interested in whether long-term changes in cultural depictions of the weather can provide useful information on changes in climate or in the public’s preoccupation with the subject (e.g., Thornes, 1979; Aplin and Williams, 2011). In the past, historical studies of the usage of various words that might reflect climate variations (e.g., ‘drought’) relied on time-consuming searches necessarily limited to a small fraction of written material, or to manually prepared indices (e.g., Nicholls, 1988). More recently, digital archives of early newspaper articles have become available for such studies (e.g., Nicholls, 2011), so that these can now be carried out very quickly and a much larger proportion of written material may be examined. The Google Books use of optical character recognition to digitise over five million books, catalogue the changes over time in the frequency of occurrence of sequences of symbols (including, but not restricted to, recognizable words) in these books, and provide online software to allow the investigation of these trends in relative frequency of usage (Michel et al., 2011) means that changes over time in the frequency of use of terms such as ‘storm’ can now be investigated. In this paper variations in the relative frequency of the use of some weather terms in books are documented. Social and technological trends, and linguistic preferences and styles, have been major influences on changes in relative frequency of usage.