Google Ngram Viewer: email

Here’s an interesting Google Ngram graph that tells you nothing about electronic mail but something quite interesting about optical character recognition, the process used to convert printed text to its digital equivalent.

On spot-checking some of the actual texts (using the links at the bottom of the page), it transpires that the apparent surge in popularity of the word “email” during the 19th century is almost entirely down to misinterpretation of the word “small” during the digitisation process.