Thread: Best OCR error I've seen yet
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Old 07-02-2016, 04:24 AM   #26
AlexBell
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Araucaria View Post
I've mentioned previously the useful google tool, Google's Ngram Viewer.

It uses scanned and OCR-ed google books, some of them quite old. Now I don't want to be too indelicate, but in virtually all of the books published in the 18th century, the "long" initial letter "s" is written in a way that makes it look like, and get OCR-ed as, a quite different consonant.

So if you try the Ngram viewer from (say) 1700 to 2000 with the two words "suck" and another similar word, you'll find an astonishing amount of profanity was being published right up to about 1810, when it vanished almost entirely, and then suddenly reappeared in the mid-twentieth century.....
Thanks for the reference. It's fascinating.
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