We thought this would be a fun way to start the weekend. Google Ngram Viewer is an amazing tool that shows the popularity of certain words in over eight million books over a specific period of time. And you can compare the results across a wide range of languages. Here is how it works: Go to http://books.google.com/ngrams, put in any word or words in the top search bar, choose the time period you’d like to search and select a language. You’ll see Google uses Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein as an example. (Spoiler alert: Frankenstein wins the popularity contest.)

We put in the terms “wellness” and “spa” and searched in American English language books between 1990 and 2008. It is interesting that the term spa started to gain momentum in the early 2000′s, while wellness stabilizes.

Wellness vs. Spa (American English)

The next search is for the same words “wellness” and “spa”, during the same time period, except now we are searching in German books. That graph looks quite different. (Notice that the term wellness started taking off around 1992 and spa started to decline.)

Wellness vs. Spa (German)

We hope you’ll give it a try. It’s interesting to compare words such as health, wellbeing, spa, wellness, etc. – and the rankings can provide valuable insight into what words are resonating in popular culture. (Or you can forget about business and just have some fun checking words like margarita, mojito and martini!)

Happy weekend,
The GSWS Team