You’ve seen me use Google Ngram Viewer output before to make points about eggcorns, adverbs, and ingenuity. Earlier this month, the tool got a few welcome upgrades. You can now conduct case-insensitive searches, find all the inflections at once, and use wildcards.

Check out these blog posts from Google’s research team and The Atlantic for more information and interesting examples of how to exploit these options. A few of mine follow.

Case insensitivity: Now, instead of searching separately for aids, Aids, and AIDS, you can toggle back and forth between having them combined and separated.

Inflections: Now, instead of searching separately for different verb tenses like run, running, ran, and runs, you can toggle back and forth between having them combined and separated.

The same logic applies to adjectives like tall, taller, and tallest.

Wildcards: Want to know which Kings are most often mentioned in books over time? Now you can, simply by adding a noun wildcard.

I thoroughly recommend playing around with these new tools. Find anything interesting? Let us know in the comments below or on Facebook or Twitter!