As you might have seen, all those words with twenty letters or more are very weird. That’s because there aren’t very many commonly used long English words. Als

As you might have seen, all those words with twenty letters or more are very weird. That’s because there aren’t very many commonly used long English words. Also, at least 100,000 times isn’t so frequent, given Google’s huge corpus. Here is the relative frequency of “Forschungsgemeinschaft” over time: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Forschungsgemeinschaft&year_start=1500&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0 http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Forschungsgemei... Here are results on Google Books when searching for “Forschungsgemeinschaft”: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Forschungsgemeinschaft%22&tbs=bks:1&lr=lang_en http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Forschungsgemeinschaft%22&... Google doesn’t promise that their English corpus only contains English books, just that it contains mostly English books. Given the raw size of their corpus this algorithmic solution seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me. The frequency of “Forschungsgemeinschaft” is also easy enough to explain: The “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” (German Research Foundation) provides lots of funding for research in Germany. It is consequently mentioned in lots of research papers, many of which are written in English.