My students and I used Google’s Ngram Viewer to illustrate the strength of orthographic conventions. Editing a mid-nineteenth-century American manuscript, we often encountered spellings that were attested in the OED for earlier centuries. We encoded those spellings as archaic orthography along with conventional nineteenth-century spellings, then employed an XSL stylesheet to create searches of Google’s Ngram Viewer that would allow us to visualize the relative frequency of the conventional and unconventional spellings. Here’s an example:
ruff (rough): First appears in entry for 1852-02-09 — “This morning when I arose I found the weather quite good and quite smooth so I sat down and went to work on some fancy work but did not remain so long before the wind came ahead and made it very ruff yesterday I was seasick and unable to write.”
View unconventional spelling in Google Books Ngram Viewer
-> Compare unconventional and conventional spellings in Ngram Viewer
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