Datasets Society · not part of the score
The words for cannabis in books
Google Books Ngram Viewer · 1800 to 2022
Words for cannabis rise and fall with the times. The Google Books Ngram Viewer counts how often each word appears in the books Google has scanned, as a share of all words printed each year; this site follows the names of the plant and the drug in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Russian since 1800.[1] The curves can be read beside the atlas entries on marijuana, Indian hemp and hashish, which writers tried at the Club des Hashischins in 1840s Paris.
Books are counted by language, not by country, and the scanned books are not a random sample of what was printed.[1] “Hemp” also means rope and cloth, so its curve is mostly about the crop. The atlas’s language section tells the story behind each word, from ganja to 420.
- File here
- ngram-cannabis-words.csv
- See also
- The files and their checksums
- not country by country
- Worldwide
- years in the file
- 1800–2022
- rows
- 5,352
What is counted, and how the file was made
How often each name of the plant and the drug appears in the books Google has scanned, as a share of all words printed that year, per billion words: in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Russian. Worldwide: books are counted by language, not by country. The scanned books are not a random sample of what was printed, and "hemp" also means rope and cloth.
Downloaded on 22 October 2026 by scripts/fetch-open-data.py (books), case-insensitive and unsmoothed, all spellings of a word summed.
The file belongs to Google Books and keeps its terms; cite the publisher when you use it.