One curious side-effect of the work to digitize books and historical texts is the ability to search these databases for words, when they first appeared and how their frequency of use has changed over time.
The Google Books n-gram corpus is a good example (an n-gram is a sequence of n words). Enter a word or phrase and it’ll show you its relative usage frequency since 1800. For example, the word “Frankenstein” first appeared in the late 1810s and has grown in popularity ever since.
