Weltanschauung in English

How often does the word Weltanschauung appear in English-language texts since the year 1500? Google's new, fascinating Ngram tool shows you that it all started in 1850:

 

Comments

[Ligia]

Hi Andrew

Thanks a lot for the tipp of Google´s Ngram. Will be cool to implement in my german classes (I tried a research on "caipirinha" in german)

[Martin]

Interesting things to learn: The internet seems to be a French invention in the 1640s and shared with the English.

Then long forgotten: My guess it was prohibited by the pope!

Martin

[M. Möhling]

@noribori
> Isn't it interesting that around 1810 for a short
> period blogs were mightier than letters

That's due to automated OCR unchecked by humans. In most cases "bloß" was read as "blog"--ß is known to be tricky to scan, cf this search. The shorter the word, the likelier an error, particularly with older scripts, eg, black letter. Shouldn't happen with longer ones like "Zeitgeist".

unrelated: our elders were not racist at all, while we're losing it since about 2000. Must be those anti-racist activist who taught us better.

[noribori]

Isn't it interesting that around 1810 for a short period blogs were mightier than letters (German: „brief“)? You can see around 1805 how letters went down – of course, Schiller died 1805 – and blogs go up and peak in 1810. What happened? Who blogged so much? It's a very short period, why did it stop? Goethe died only 1832.

I suppose Google can't answer that question, otherwise history would have to be entirely rewritten.

[Ney]

Try "Gesundheit". Strange database?

[Mison]

Really interesting are the graphs on Zeitgeist. The German one has a strong peak around 1810 and the word has fallen out of use ever since. In English however, this word is steadily gaining popularity since 1890.
And now the punchline: The word has a comeback in German since the 1970s, possibly alongside with the English usage.