Source — Google Books Ngram Viewer, "untranslatable words" (English corpus)
- Title/query: Ngram frequency of the phrase "untranslatable words," English corpus
- Author: n/a — raw corpus-frequency data, Google Books Ngram Viewer (built on the Google Books scanned-text corpus)
- Publication: Google Books Ngram Viewer,
en-2019corpus - Date: corpus covers publication years through 2019; queried 2026-09-01
- URL: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=untranslatable+words&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 (interactive viewer); raw data fetched directly via https://books.google.com/ngrams/json?content=untranslatable+words&year_start=1940&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0
- Type: primary (raw corpus-frequency data) / neutral
- Accessed: 2026-09-01
Extract
- The exact phrase "untranslatable words" has a nonzero frequency in the
en-2019corpus in every single year from 1940 through 2019 (raw JSON queried directly, not the rendered chart, which this project's tools cannot read visually) — i.e., the phrase itself was already circulating in English-language print by 1940, roughly noisily flat at a low level (order of 10⁻⁹ relative frequency) through the 1980s, with no sharp jump around 1988 (Rheingold) specifically. - A sharp, unambiguous rise begins around 2017 (values roughly double to quadruple the pre-2016 baseline by 2018–2019) — consistent with, and independent corroboration of, the project's existing finding (Luu 2016; see jstor-daily-luu-2016-hygge.md) that 2016 marked a peak/inflection in the popular genre, with the print record catching up in the following two to three years.
Gaps
- Ngram frequency counts occurrences of the phrase across the entire scanned-books corpus without regard to context — a scholarly translation-theory monograph using the phrase once counts the same as a listicle-genre book using it repeatedly. This data point shows the phrase predates the genre's 1988 earliest-known instance by decades; it does not show that any book-form or article-form instance of the popular untranslatable-words genre itself existed before 1988. Treat as corroborating context for the genre's chronology, not as evidence of an earlier genre instance.
- The
en-2019corpus does not extend past 2019; it cannot speak to trends after that year. - This project has not identified which specific books or documents contain the phrase in which years — the data is aggregate frequency only.