Abstract: Google’s Ngram Viewer often gives a distorted view of the popularity of cultural/religious phrases during the early 19th century and before. Other larger textual sources can provide a truer picture of relevant usage patterns of various content-rich phrases that occur in the Book of Mormon. Such an approach suggests that almost all of its phraseology fits comfortably within its syntactic framework, which is mostly early modern in character.

During the past decade, with the advent of Google’s Ngram Viewer (books.google.com/ngrams), many have become interested in noting the historical (textual) popularity rates of various cultural, content- rich Book of Mormon phrases such as “demands of justice.” Some have concluded by what they have seen in Ngram Viewer charts that the evidence suggests the Book of Mormon is 19th-century in character and that Joseph Smith was the author or the partial author of the text (from revealed ideas).1 My purpose here is to show that this recently developed interpretive tool is quite often misleading in relation to the Book of Mormon and that it’s important to reserve judgment on historical usage patterns until multiple textual sources have been consulted. It’s also important to recognize the type of language can tell us something definitive about Book of Mormon authorship and the fundamental nature of its language.

A database such as Google Books, which contains a large number of religious writings, is potentially an appropriate corpus to use in comparing Book of Mormon English. That is because, though dictated, the Book of Mormon text presents itself as a written translation of authors and editors who also wrote out their compositions (though [Page 188]some chapters are said to be transcripts of oral discourse). The narrative complexity, matching internal references, exact phrasal repetition (sometimes at a distance), intricate structuring (both large- and small-scale), and even instances of syntactic complexity suggest a primarily written work rather than a primarily oral production.

Because the text is full of biblical blending and religious language set in a framework of mostly early modern syntax, the Early English Books Online database2 provides the largest amount of matching language — religious, lexical, and syntactic. EEBO contains many religious writings, including sermons as well as the early biblical texts [1530–1610]. After EEBO, the next most relevant database for comparison is Eighteenth Century Collections Online.3 After EEBO and ECCO, the most relevant corpora are probably Google Books4 and the early American databases, Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker (these also contain many British writings republished in America, overlapping with content found in ECCO and even EEBO).