Abstract
his paper explores a new methodology for extracting forms that were once common but are now obsolete, from large corpora. It proceeds from the relatively under-researched problem of lexical mortality, or obsolescence in general, to the formulation of two closely related procedures for querying the n-gram data of the Google Books project in order to identify the best word and lexical expression candidates that may have become lost or obsolete in the course of the last three centuries, from the Late Modern era to Present-day English (1700-2000).
After describing the techniques used to process big uni- and trigram data, this chapter offers a selective analysis of the results and proposes ways the methodology may be of help to corpus linguists as well as historical lexicographers.