Aesthetic + Complexity Word Frequency

Google Ngram Viewer shows the frequency of words or phrases in books. This the chart for the words aesthetic and complexity between the years 1700 and 2000:Complexity overtakes aesthetic from 1962, and the frequency of both dip around the time of the two world wars. There’s a peak in aesthetic in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but it doesn’t really get going until the 1850s. The current meaning of aesthetic was developed by Alexander Baumgarten, who used the term to mean “things perceived”, as opposed to “things known”. Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750) was written in German. Here’s another chart for the equivalent words in German books over the same period, showing a quite different pattern: The biggest peak for ästhetisch is around the time Kant published the Critique of Judgement (1790). The crossover in frequency to Komplexität is 1965, during a steep rise in usage up to a present-day level that’s very similar to its English equivalent at around 0.0025%.

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