Google books - they've had their share of litigation over orphan book publishing fairness. Yet now, a new online toy.

You can trace word usage over an extensive corpus, courtesy of Google books, and over a time span that you might find interesting - even fun, for a few tries.

Read of it here; try it here. A few I did, so readers could see what great insights I've uncovered [as always, click a thumbnail image to enlarge and read]:

I admit to an arguably shallow first effort. Have a try. My charts are easily out-done.

___________UPDATE__________
Here, here and here, for further commentary.