"The datasets we're making available today to further humanities research are based on a subset of that corpus, weighing in at 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year. (...) The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years," says Jon Orwant, from the Google Books team. Source
Click on the image for an enlarged view
A very interesting pattern emerges. Between years 1700-1800 word Fun appears a lot in the books. It dominates heavily the other three words. After 1800 the use of word Happiness takes off while fun drops offs sharply. At the same time the use of word science starts taking off. Around 1850 a cross over occurs where Happiness start tapering off while Science start moving up. While all this is happening Technology is nowhere on the radar. Between 1900 and 2000 fun and happiness takes a back seat to Science and Technology. Technology picks up around 1950 while Science keeps moving in an upward trend.
These trends are very interesting. They point towards the fact that Science and Technology are antithesis of Fun and Happiness. Emergence of these two has followed by a decrease in Fun and Happiness. This trend is contrary to the accepted wisdom that more Science and Technology will improve the quality of life leading to more fun and happiness. It also raises a question: Are we really happier than our ancestors?
If interested do your own investigation using Ngram here
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