Our next guest post comes from Adam Kilgarriff. Adam is a linguist, and a specialist in the area where linguistics, computers and dictionaries meet. He was at Brighton University until 2004 when he set up his own company, Lexical Computing Ltd. He lives in Brighton, and will be taking a lunchtime swim in the sea today!

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Google is an interesting verb. First, it is new, yet it is already fairly high-frequency. Second, most new words are nouns, so it is a pleasure to find a verb there, and appealing too as verbs do more, so there is more to explore about them. And third, most words are language-specific. Bread is an English word, and even if there is something that sounds the same in another language (e.g. Dutch brood, German das Brot), it is a different word. But in google it seems fair to say that we have a word that exists in most languages of the world.

Google has a standard English spelling and sound pattern. We have no difficulty adding endings, to give googling, googles, googled, or applying other add-ons to give googlebot, googlewhack, googleplex, googlers and googlebomb. It’s less straightforward in other languages. If we start with a near-neighbour, German uses u not double-o for the ‘oo’ sound, and does not have a silent e at the ends of words, so when Germans bring the verb into their language they are torn between the trademark spelling, and the spelling that fits with their language rules. All those alternatives combine to give four versions of the basic form (as witnessed in a large collection of German texts or ‘corpus’):

google, googel, googl, googele
five of the infinitive: googlen, googln, googeln, googleln, gugeln
five for the past participle: gegooglet, gegoogled, gegugelt, gegoogl, gegoogelt

with a grand total of no less than 34 variants.

That’s before we get idiomatic. Another common form in German was rumgooglen. A little investigation showed that this was a shortened version of herumgooglen, and it always occurred in phrases like ein bisschen rumgooglen, ‘to google around bit’.

For Italian the google family (as found in a big Italian corpus) looks like something from a textbook: googlo, googla, googlasse, googlare, googlato, googlò, googlando, and googlato. When Spanish adds pronouns into verbs, it does so for google too: googleadme (‘Google me’).

The Slav languages make subtle changes to the verb in terms of whether it is an ongoing or completed action by adding suffixes. In a large Slovak corpus we find:

googlovať     googlujú     googluj     gúgli     gúgliť     nagoogliť     pogooglovať     pregooglujú     negooglovali     vygoogliť     vygooglite     vygoogli     vygooglených     vygooglené     vygooglim     vygooglovať     vygooglujem     vygooglovaná     vygooglovali     vygooglovala     vygooglujeme     vygúglená     vygúgli     vygúglili     zagúglite

Welsh, like German, doesn’t use ‘oo’, but uses w instead, so googlebombing in Welsh is gwglbomio.

The Asian languages I looked at do not use verbs quite as we do: they make extensive use of the technique we use when we say I had a shower rather than I showered. So google in Telugu, Hindi, Chinese and Persian can be translated as ‘do google’. These languages do not use the latin alphabet (and Chinese does not use an alphabet at all). We found two forms of each variant in Chinese depending on whether the writer had chosen to use Google’s official Chinese name or to switch to the latin alphabet. Similarly in Greek we have γκούγκλαρα or googlαρα.

In sum, whatever you think of the search engine or the company, google is a rather likeable verb, particularly for linguists, as for them it’s like a newborn babe, wandering innocently out into the complex world of spelling, sound patterns, prefixes and suffixes and adapting to wherever it find itself.

Samuel Johnson famously said that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. This is sometimes misquoted as “when a man is bored with London, he is bored with life” (and sometimes wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde, but that’s another story). But what the great lexicographer definitely didn’t say was “when a man is bored of London, he is bored of life”.

Look in any dictionary and you will find that the “correct” preposition to use with bored is with. No one mentions bored of (not even hot-off-the-press books like the 2009 edition of Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English). Yet, whatever purists may think about it, our language data shows that, in 2009, more people say bored of than bored with. How has this happened?

For many years, the best electronic resource for observing English in use was the British National Corpus (BNC) – a digital collection of books, newspapers, recorded conversations, and much else, covering the widest possible range of subject matter in both “imaginative” (fictional) and “informative” media. When it launched in 1993, the BNC – with 100 million words of text – was at the cutting edge of language technology. Though still an excellent corpus, the BNC has been overtaken in sheer scale by the corpora we use now (typically containing about 2 billion words) and of course by the Web itself – an almost infinite reservoir of language data. This means we can analyse, in great detail, what people actually write and say when they communicate with one another (as opposed to asking them what they think they say or telling them what we think they should say).

And what does this data tell us? In the BNC (whose texts span the period roughly from 1975 to 1992), there are 246 instances of bored with, and just 10 hits for bored of. The sources are revealing, too: about half the bored of citations come from informal conversations, like this excerpt:

I reckon they should do tea here, I’m getting really bored of coffee I tell you.

The rest are from magazines like The Face (now sadly defunct) and the New Musical Express – texts aimed at a young readership, and often a good place to look for emerging language trends. So as recently as 1993, bored of was a rarity. As it happens, I touched on all this in an article written back in 2003, and noted there some figures from a Google search (Google, remember, was still in its infancy at that point): Google found 112,000 instances of bored of, but bored with still held a comfortable lead with about 340,000. Not so today: try a Googlefight pitting bored of against bored with and bored of is now narrowly in front.

There’s a possible distractor here in the phrase “Bored of the Rings”, which surfaces in various parodies of Tolkien’s well-known trilogy – there is a book of this name, a movie, a fansite and even an entry in Wikipedia. So let’s try a search that rules this out: bored of it vs. bored with it. This time the version using “with” maintains a slender lead, but this is unlikely to last. If you listen out, you’ll hear that most people under 35 say bored of – presumably by analogy with tired of – and it can’t be denied that this is, phonologically speaking, less hard work: bored of trips off the tongue more easily. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for “of” to be recognised, first as an acceptable alternative to “with”, and (eventually, no doubt) as the standard preposition to use in these circumstances.