Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books Jean-Baptiste Michel, 1,2,3,4 *† Yuan Kui Shen, 5 Aviva Presser Aiden, 6 Adrian Veres, 7 Matthew K. Gray, 8 The Google Books Team, 8 Joseph P. Pickett, 9 Dale Hoiberg, 10 Dan Clancy, 8 Peter Norvig, 8 Jon Orwant, 8 Steven Pinker, 4 Martin A. Nowak, 1,11,12 Erez Lieberman Aiden 1,12,13,14,15,16 *† 1 Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 2 Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 3 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 4 Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA. 5 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 6 Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02115, USA. 7 Harvard College, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 8 Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, 94043, USA. 9 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, MA 02116, USA. 10 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, IL 60654, USA. 11 Dept of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 12 Dept of Mathematics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 13 Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 14 School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 15 Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 16 Laboratory-at-Large, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. *These authors contributed equally to this work. †To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected] (J.B.M.); [email protected] (E.A.). We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of “culturomics”, focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800