Why does Ngram show an extreme spike in use of "LOL" in mid 1600s?
score:112
In Ngram viewer, along the bottom you can find the actual books that contain the words. By following those links I came across The Changeling By Thomas Middleton, William Rowley whose text looks like this:
So there you have it. "Lol" is a contraction of "Lollio", which looks like a character's name in this book.
In general, I would be extremely wary about Ngram results for
- Huge timeframes
- Where language usage, and the language itself, has changed drastically over time
- Results far into the past, where the corpus size is much smaller and easily affected by a single text
- Looking for words that didn't exist during a time period
Upvote:2
"To my surprise, this came up"
Why, you don't honestly believe it was an acronym for laughs out loud in 1800 do you?
You should give a little thought to the idea that what you've searched there includes real words as well as acronyms with completely different meanings that just happen to be spelled the same.
An old or alternative (or just lazy) spelling of loll seems the most likely cause of those statistics to me.
meaning to "sit, lie, or stand in a lazy, relaxed way."
Words don't just fall in & out of favor with time, they change, old words disappear, new words appear & something spelled the same way in 1500 as a word in 2018 may have absolutely nothing to do with the current word either in it's usage & meaning or the etymology of its origins.
Your results from 1500 are pretty pointless in this instance & certainly don't point to the use of lol as an acronym for laughs out loud in that century that you seem to be wondering about.
Upvote:21
In addition to the previous answer...
"Lol" is a nonsense syllable frequently used in mouth music. Other similar syllables are "fa", "la", "fiddle", "diddle", and so on - think of the song Deck the halls, for example, or Whack-fol-de-diddle from the Dubliners. This has always been a staple of English folk music. More recently, scat singing uses the same principle in jazz. The concept is the same though - the nonsense syllables are chosen for their sustained and/or plosive qualities to fit the meter of the song.
In the 16th century, madrigals spawned a new genre called balletto which featured this as a standard part of the form, and this coincided with the widespread availability of printing. It is not inconceivable that transcriptions of broadsheet songs would skew the statistics for these mouth music "words".
Upvote:38
Congusbongus's answer is very good, and points out that you can find the actual books that contribute to the spike: link. I think "higher prevalence of OCR errors, and very low sample population" is a solid hypothesis.
I noticed one more phenomenon of pre-1800 English text that could contribute to this particular OCR error. See, "lol" has two "l"s, and pre-1800 English text has a statistically very high number of "l"s when run through OCR... because of the long s. I see at least two cases of Google reading "lol" in the middle of a word that actually contains "loſ" with an S:
Here, in the middle of a pretty good OCR, Google reads "loſt his horſe" as "lol't his horfe."
Here, grasping at straws, Google reads "cloſe" as "C'lOl'i.'"
But Google also reads "lol" in a couple of places for "fol." (meaning "folio") and for "for." Maybe there's something about these old typefaces that makes their "f"s as well as their "ſ"s look like "l"s.
Graham's theory of "lol" being commonly found in "Fol lol" and "Tol lol lay," while not directly relevant to your 1500–1700 search, is certainly borne out by the next century's worth of ngram results!
More post
- 📝 What did it mean that Italy was an Empire?
- 📝 The most awesome army: 80 men left and 81 returned. Is it true?
- 📝 How did muzzle-loaded rifled artillery solve the problems of the hand-held rifle?
- 📝 Once formed, could a Confederate militia company find replacements to remain an effective force? How?
- 📝 Have sanctions ever stopped a nation from starting or continuing a war?
- 📝 When did $10,000 banknotes become available to the public in the British colonies of South East Asia?
- 📝 About how long ago was the most recent day on which a human did not die
- 📝 Founding Fathers and the American Civil War
- 📝 What is the social history of British popular opposition to Thatcher over the miner’s strike?
- 📝 Why were northern Native Americans less urban than central or southern?
- 📝 Battles that ended with a disaster for all the parties
- 📝 Private firms (aka mercenaries) as a police force
- 📝 Did anyone ever use comedy as a combat tactic?
- 📝 Has anyone (other than Churchill) indicated that the Germans might have won a negotiated peace in World War II?
- 📝 What does "Depot Battalion" mean in Hart's Annual Army List?
- 📝 How were siege ladders used to attack medieval castle walls?
- 📝 How was Munich Captured in WWII?
- 📝 Major power shift in Gaul circa 350 B.C
- 📝 What is this Tiger tank wingman UGV?
- 📝 Why were there "Tributary States" to the Ottoman Empire?
- 📝 What was the first emergency management agency in the world?
- 📝 Maximum speed of communication prior to Trans-Atlantic Cable?
- 📝 What role did the United States government and major corporations have in controlling dissent and protest starting in the late 1940s?
- 📝 When was the last time a country acquired territory by buying land from another country?
- 📝 Was the decrypting of communications in WW2 a one-sided effort, or did Germany also do it?
- 📝 Impact of the Berlin Wall to GDR
- 📝 Why did Saladin show kindness to Richard I?
- 📝 Was the introduction of paper money controversial like cryptocurrency?
- 📝 Why is the capital of Turkey Ankara rather than Istanbul?
- 📝 Were bicycles widespread in the Soviet Union?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Why does Ngram show an extreme spike in use of "LOL" in mid 1600s?
- 📝 Why does Japan use the same type of AC power outlet as the US?
- 📝 Why does the US use the opposite convention to the rest of the world for colour-coding harbour buoys?
- 📝 Why does English use Roman months, but Germanic days of the week?
- 📝 Why does the parish register show more baptisms than burials?
- 📝 Why does the US use MM/DD/YY?
- 📝 Why does the Spanish Military Medical Corps use the Amalfitan Cross?
- 📝 Why does the Canadian Air Force name its ranks like its Army, whilst the Australian and New Zealand Air Forces use the Royal Air Force's?
- 📝 Why does the United States keep using "old" date representations and imperial system, while being in the minority?
- 📝 Why exactly did telegraphs have to use "STOP" instead of a period and "QUOTE" instead of a quotation mark? (Or special codes.)
- 📝 If the Union Jack joins the flag of England and Scotland, why does it have a different shade of blue than the Scottish flag?
- 📝 Why do the pyramids show less erosion than the Sphinx?
- 📝 Why did the Germans use the Enigma machine rather than the far superior "Lorenz" cipher machine?
- 📝 Why does German money from the 1940s not bear Nazi symbols?
- 📝 Why did Hitler not order the use of poison gas in combat?
- 📝 Why does this London Underground poster from 1924 have a Star of David atop a Christmas tree?
- 📝 Why did only the English adopt, evolve and use the longbow en masse in war?
- 📝 When and why did the use of the lifespans of royalty to limit clauses in contracts come about?
- 📝 Why didn't Japanese infantrymen and samurai use shields?
- 📝 Why does the King of Spain still claim defunct titles like the King of Hungary?
- 📝 Why does Latin America have a higher number of surviving Native Americans than North America?
- 📝 Why did the grip-centered viking shield fall out of use relative to the kite shields?
- 📝 Why did Roosevelt and Churchill use voice-based telecommunication, instead of simpler text-based options which were easier to encrypt?
- 📝 Why did Saladin show kindness to Richard I?
- 📝 Why does the Great Wall of China follow such a bendy route?
- 📝 Why does Romanian culture have Latin influences?
- 📝 Why does a Star of David appear at a rally with Francisco Franco?
- 📝 Why did Jodrell Bank assist the Soviet Union to collect data from their spacecraft in the mid 1960's?
- 📝 Why did really old paintings use such bizarre, unnatural perspective/proportions?
- 📝 Why does Edinburgh Castle's one o'clock gun fire at 1pm instead of, say, noon?