ProQuest News & Newspapers (proquest. com), which allows online search of newspaper articles and advertisements back to the 1700s, shows that the phrase go viral (and variations going viral, went viral, and gone viral) first appeared as an epidemic in newspapers only around 2009, typically in connection with stories about the Internet. The associated term viral marketing goes back only a little further, to 1991, as the name of a small company in Nagpur, India. Today, as a ProQuest search reveals, the phrase going viral itself has gone viral. Google Ngrams (books.google. com/ngrams), which
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Trivia - Going viral
