Sally Thomason posted recently about "trodding" for "treading" in the NYT, and speculated that "trod might replace [tread] completely in the not too distant future." I thought I'd check if Altavista's "date range" feature might help confirm this hypothesis.
Time period |
treading |
trodding |
Ratio |
percent trodding |
| 03/02/96-03/01/98 | 975 |
29 |
33.6 |
3.0% |
| 03/02/98-03/01/00 | 4432 |
113 |
39.2 |
2.6% |
| 03/02/00-03/01/02 | 10108 |
251 |
40.3 |
2.5% |
| 03/02/02-03/01/04 | 83297 |
2027 |
41.1 |
2.4% |
For what they're worth, these numbers actually suggest that trodding's market share is decreasing slightly. I'd be hesitant to draw strong conclusions about sociolinguistic trends from this kind of data, though, since the distribution of sources, genres etc. on the web has not been constant over time. Since the observed "trend" in this case is weak at best, it's probably not worth trying to sharpen up the experiment.
Posted by Mark Liberman at March 11, 2004 01:48 PM