Terminology

Google Books provides an interesting source for showing which terms were used in which era.

The Google NGrams Viewer composes graphs of the occurrence of words or phrases in the Google Books Corpus, as a function of publication year. This gives us an opportunity to observe the evolution of terminology.

Of course, some limitations apply:

    • The corpus itself is limited in coverage.

    • The OCR-process may vary in quality between publication eras and may favor some words over others.

    • The attribution of the publication year can be wrong, especially for issues of long-running periodicals.

    • The NGrams can not add counts of word variants (calculator and calculators give different numbers which we would like to add for our purpose)
      Update 2021: now it is possible to add counts, e.g. calculator+calculators. Note that only the case-sensitive option can be used when adding. So you might want to use (calculator+Calculator+calculators+Calculators)

Let's try some computing terms, in different sub-corpora, and with a 5 year smoothing window. Note that the numbers are ratio's: the counts are normalized by the number of books published in each year. This page contains "frozen" graphs using the pre-2013 corpora until 1970 (generated August 2016). Click on a graph to get an interactive version.
Update 2021: Click on the [2019] links to see the graph for 2019 corpora running until 2019.

calculator,comptometer,arithmometer,calculating machine (Corpus: English 2012)

https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=comptometer%2Carithmometer%2Ccalculator%2Ccalculating+machine&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1700&year_end=1970&corpus=15&smoothing=5&share=

calculator,comptometer,arithmometer,calculating machine (Corpus: American English 2009)

calculator,comptometer,arithmometer,calculating machine (Corpus: British English 2012)

In early years, "calculator" could be a person calculating or a booklet containing multiplication and conversion tables. This might explain the large difference between the American and British curves around 1800.

Comptometer,Arithmometer,Rechenmaschine (Corpus: German 2012)

The NGrams Viewer also contains a German corpus. Note that the German nouns should start with a capital, otherwise the count will be zero.

machine à calculer,comptomètre,arithmomètre (Corpus: French 2012)

planimeter,platometer,integrator (Corpus: English 2012)

Arithmometer (French, English, German)

The NGrams Viewer can not compare between corpora. To show the occurrence of "Arithmometer" in French (arithmomètre), English (arithmometer) and German (Arithmometer). I combined three graphs to one with arbitrary y-scales (data collected in December 2010)
Update 2021: now it is possible to compare between corpora. Click the image for a non-exact reconstruction using the 2012 corpora.

Slide rule (French, English, German)

Again, a static plot comparing three corpora: French (règle à calcul), English (slide rule) and German (Rechenschieber).
(arbitrary y-scale, data collected in December 2010)
Update 2021: now it is possible to compare between corpora. Click the image for a non-exact reconstruction using the 2012 corpora.