Bad OCR

[mccalluc]

The corpora also tell us something about the history of printing technology:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=(bo*0.1)%2Chavo%2C(thoy*5)%2Cono&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15

Late 19th century peak where "e" is misread as "o": This is also a time when the volume of printed material is expanding, and the quality of paper may be in decline.

British:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28bo*0.1%29%2Chavo%2C%28thoy*5%29%2Cono&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=en-GB-2012&smoothing=3

American:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28bo*0.1%29%2Chavo%2C%28thoy*5%29%2Cono&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=en-US-2012&smoothing=3

French:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28jo*4%29%2Cot%2C%28allor*45%29%2C%28fairo*20%29&year_start=1840&year_end=2000&corpus=fr-2009&smoothing=3

Anne wrote:

I know ink spread is affected by the composition of the ink and the finish of the paper, in addition to the composition of the paper... also ink spread is a sign of fast/inattentive printing, so maybe there's a case to be made that during 1860s-1880 there was a greater volume of printing at a lower cost... or maybe there were more newspapers and periodicals printed in that period, and newspapers and periodicals are always hastily printed. But it's true that that was also exactly the window when wood pulpy paper was introduced so that theory seems promising. Maybe it took those 20 years to figure out how to process the new paper so it was properly receptive to the presses, or how to recompose the ink.