Google Ngram Viewer

The Google Books Ngram Viewer is terrific fun, and extremely clever. It lets you search for the frequency of all sorts of words and phrases in all the published books that Google have scanned in. You could get lost in it for hours and obviously I ran some bridge queries to see what came up.

Here we see how contract bridge took over from auction bridge in the 1930s, and how both have gradually declined since that incredible peak.

This is a weird one. For the most part there are as many who win at bridge as who lose at bridge, but during the war the losers spike massively. This doesn't appear to be caused by actual bridges being destroyed; if you do the search yourself you can see that most of the books it lists are talking about playing cards. Maybe it reflects the mood of the day?


Here we see the history of poor bridge, at least in the English-speaking world. I love the humungous spike in the 1820's - there must have been some truly terrible bridge players around in those days.

Finally, we have proof, as if it was needed, that the beer card is the most important card. It gets substantially more press than the cards on either side, for almost the whole of the 20th century.