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The Term Freemasonry in Books Since 1800

A7V

Registered User
I was playing with Google's Ngram Viewer today and decided to see how the word Freemasonry fared in English writing since 1800.

For those that are not familiar with the Ngram Viewer it is really simple and here is the gist from google:

When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years.

Here are the results

freemasonry.jpg

It seems the height of the word Freemasonry was around 1830-1840 and the low point was the late 1970's and early 1980's.

What is most interesting is that we appear to be in an upswing, the downside of Ngram is that it doesn't tell you in what light the word was being used, so the upswing we are seeing now may be anti-masonic literature, and the high point in the 1830's may have also been anti-masonic in nature.

If you want to play around with Ngram viewer you can find it here: Google Ngram Viewer
 

BryanMaloney

Premium Member
Try the following combinations of phrases (each as a separate search):

York Rite,Scottish Rite
Hiram Abif
the widow's son
Great Architect of the Universe
Stated Meeting
 
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