Oldsters and Ngrams: age stereotypes across time.

Google Books Ngram Viewer searches over five million books published between 1800 and 2000 and plots trends in word usage. With this tool, the frequencies of literary references to younger and older adults were assessed across time. Young and old women were shown to be underrepresented in the literature for the past 200 years. In addition, the usage of different terms and adjectives to describe older adults were tracked and found to change across time. The literature of the early 1900s, e.g., revealed a shift from more positive to less positive terms, which may reflect a change in attitude toward older adults.