Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 27 minutes ago
The word "war" seizes the #1 spot in English fiction twice — and both times land exactly when you'd guess.
This bar chart race tracks how often 16 words — love, king, law, god, war, death, money, murder, science, ghost, machine, freedom, fire, magic, hell, heaven — appear per million words of published English fiction, every year from 1800 to 2019.
The word "war" only reaches #1 twice across 220 years — 1918, then again in 1943-44 — and both times land exactly on the two world wars. Outside of those two spikes, five words genuinely compete for the lead across two centuries: "king" opens the race and holds it unbroken for 52 straight years, "love" takes over as romance fiction rises and returns to close out the modern era, and "law" owns a long run through the mid-20th century.
The data is real, sourced from Google Books Ngram's English-fiction-only corpus (not the general English corpus), and lightly smoothed to remove year-to-year sampling noise — smoothing is disclosed, not hidden. This measures how often each word appears in fiction, not how much fiction is "about" that topic.
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The word "war" seizes the #1 spot in English fiction twice — and both times land exactly when you'd guess.
This bar chart race tracks how often 16 words — love, king, law, god, war, death, money, murder, science, ghost, machine, freedom, fire, magic, hell, heaven — appear per million words of published English fiction, every year from 1800 to 2019.
The word "war" only reaches #1 twice across 220 years — 1918, then again in 1943-44 — and both times land exactly on the two world wars. Outside of those two spikes, five words genuinely compete for the lead across two centuries: "king" opens the race and holds it unbroken for 52 straight years, "love" takes over as romance fiction rises and returns to close out the modern era, and "law" owns a long run through the mid-20th century.
The data is real, sourced from Google Books Ngram's English-fiction-only corpus (not the general English corpus), and lightly smoothed to remove year-to-year sampling noise — smoothing is disclosed, not hidden. This measures how often each word appears in fiction, not how much fiction is "about" that topic.
For other similar videos such as this, check out our "Infographics & Statistics" playlist - bit.ly/GFEStatsPlaylist
🔔 Other playlists
==============
🎥 Everything About Authors - goo.gl/H1oBlT
🎥 The Book World of Facts - goo.gl/1pwST2
🎥 Popular Book Cover Design Variations - goo.gl/kHuAFu
🎥 Reading / Writing Tips & Tricks - goo.gl/HmHur0
🎥 Book & Reading Recommendations - goo.gl/IEKDOq
🎥 Popular Book & Author Quotes - goo.gl/SZCBAX
🎥 Stephen King - The King of Horror - goo.gl/zxQ9pf
🎥 Free Ebooks - goo.gl/uYS95P
🎥 Book to Movie Adaptations - goo.gl/vEj7gn
🎥 Quizzes - goo.gl/UE4RSd
🎥 Movie Cast Then and Now - goo.gl/oL6gaj
🎥 Infographics & Statistics - bit.ly/GFEStatsPlaylist
🎥 Cards - Book Infographics - bit.ly/GFECards
🎥 Literature & Music - bit.ly/literatureandmusic
Don't forget to subscribe to our channel and click on the bell for more amazing content in the future.
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#fiction #bookdata #ngram #bookstats #literaryanalysis
