Ngrams

Editing is mind-bending. Novelists spend longer than they’d admit checking spelling & word use, but historical novelists have the added parlour game of anachronism spotting. Dictionaries don’t always give dates/usage, and the OED is a hefty thing to carry around.

How do you do it?

I don’t know who put me on to this excellent word-usage Google Ngram site, but it’s a winner. Punters and henchmen I can just about get away with in 1860s, payback and pen-pushing not.

Here’s a list of recent words to check:

half-cock

safeguard

fudge

punters

pen-pushing

letdown

viz

refugee

recalcitrant

prostitute

henchman

vice (police department)

budget (verb)