The world according to Andrew

Each day in the G2 section of the Guardian is a question to which readers are invited to respond. A couple of days ago the question was “When did people start calling the Railway station the Train station?”

There was no direct answer in the paper, however it got me thinking about how we might solve this. I’ve been toying with the Google NGram viewer for a few weeks now and it seemed like the perfect tool for the job. The NGram viewer allows you to see language trends based on the occurrences of words in the documents that Google has scanned over time.

You can see from the graph above that Train station came into modern prose in the 1940′s and became to norm in about 1999 give or take. Interestingly Railway station has had a bit of a resurgence since the Millenium while Train station has declined slightly. No idea why. I wonder what it’s called in Harry Potter?