Playgrounds on Google NGram

So of course I had to do some Ngramming of playground terms as soon as I heard about the new Google feature, which tracks mentions of words in their corpus of scanned media:

The word 'playground' really doesn't exist before 1800, and even then it is frequently used without reference to children (i.e. the Playground of Algiers).  Note that 'playground' spikes in the early twentieth century, when the growth of urban areas generated a great deal of philanthropic activity around provisions for the needy in general and children in particular.  There's a small spike during the mustachioed seventies, and I am pleased to see that interest has been rising since the mid-nineties!

 

'Playscape' doesn't enter the language at all until 1960, spikes in the 1980s as a new way of phrasing playgrounds, and seems to still be rising, though with a bit of a hitch.  The Ngrams are based on google's 2009 holdings.

Most of the combination ngrams (like 'playground' with 'children', 'school, 'safety', etc.) don't work well because there are just so many more mentions of words like 'children'.  But here is a fascinating one:  the combined ngram of 'playground' and 'obesity'. 

Note the point at which mentions of 'obesity' cross-over mentions of 'playground'....it's much earlier than I expected, about 1965.  And it probably reflects mostly adult obesity but still, fascinating.

And one more, 'playground' and 'risk':

No particular correlation between the two, but it shows what playgrounds are up against...a virtually flat definition of risk that expands exponentially not in say, WWII or somesuch serious time, but in the late 1970s.  And look at that line go.