The OED Text Visualizer

June 27, 2020

The OED Text Visualizer is an amazing new research tool from OED Labs based on a powerful data engine that automatically annotates text. The Visualizer displays etymological information in an attractive visual format that can ‘open up new areas of questioning and means of discovery’.

It works like this: Paste up to 500 words into the box on this page, add the text’s date, click the button, and you get an instant display of word origins, helpfully colour-coordinated, along a 1,000-year timeline.

Here’s what I got with the first eight paragraphs of my post on the word culchie:

[click to embiggen]

Screengrab of the OED Text Visualizer. It shows a rectangular display with colour-coded bubbles of various sizes scattered along a timescale from before the year 1000 up to 2000 on the x-axis. Along the top are the colour codes: English, in blue (97), Germanic, in dark green (82), Romance, in red (66), Latin, in purple (23), other, in yellow (6), and Celtic, in orange (1).

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