Reference material for change in English usage over time [closed]

Solution 1:

If you're researching one or more specific words, having many editions of dictionaries from different times, and especially many editions of the same dictionary, can be very instructional to see when meanings change, especially when new meanings arise. Most common (and also with the most editions) is Merriam Webster (specifically, many editions of the Collegiate dating from the 1950s to the present), but perhaps better regarded is American Heritage (with both full/unabridged and "College Editions").

Looking online, I have not found a "good" near-comprehensive list of words that have changed. I'm most interested in words that have change recently (within my lifetime, the last 50 years or so), but I haven't found much of any value over any time period.

The latest change I've observed is "digital music." When music CDs came out they were one of the first well-known commercial "digital" products. Nowadays digital music usually refers only to musical content streamed or downloaded from the Internet, and CDs are considered something separate. There's no place I know of to document this.

For lists of words whose meaning have changed, I found many articles with the same dozen or so "awful" (pun intended) words, but these two links have by far the most words I've seen:

• The Mad Logophile Words that have changed their meaning (part 1)

• The Mad Logophile Words that have changed their meaning (part 2)

An invaluable online reference for word usage frequency over time is Google Ngram Viewer.

One problem with ngram if you're looking for recent changes, it only shows word frequencies through the year 2000.