Ken,
In contradiction to your claim, my searches on Google Ngram (which I believe
are more accurate than yours) indicate the use of design as a NOUN is
considerably higher (roughly double) the use of design as a VERB.
That is, the use of the term design as a NOUN strongly dominates over the
last 200 years at least.
In addition, I would argue that the predominant mode of written use of the
term design is as a noun, and that this is found in the grey literature of
discussions about designs, mainly in engineering design practices. I'd
suggest that this dominates compared to the number of occurrences of the
term design of noun or verb found in books.
That is, the number of projects for which designs (as drawings) are created
and discussed is many times greater than the number of books published.
Think that for a car, there are likely to be tens of thousands of designs
(drawings) of its parts each with their own discourse, and only the odd book
about the vehicle.
Google NGram ignores all of this grey literature and only calculates its
statistics from books.
None the less, Google Ngram can be used to identify the verb and noun use
of words in those books.
The figures though are the OPPPOSITE, by a long way, to those you quoted.
Without going the messy route you chose with its contradictions, you can get
the data from Google NGram directly with its parts of speech tag combined
with its inflection tag.
That is, use the following two Google NGram searches: design_INF_NOUN and
design_INF_VERB with both set to case insensitive.
The results are that the average use of design as a NOUN in books is around
twice (200%) that of design as a VERB from the period 1800 to 2000. Average
use of design as a NOUN is ~0.01% compared to average use of design as a
VERB at ~0.005%
For the year 2000, the results are closer, with the reported use of design
as a NOUN being around two fifths more (140%) than the use of design as a
VERB. At year 2000, average use of design as a NOUN is ~0.014% compared to
average use of design as a VERB at ~0.010%
This indicates design as a NOUN is significantly more common both currently
and throughout the 200 year period from 1800 to 2000.
Of special interest for me, and I thank you for pointing me to Google NGram,
which I had forgotten, is the historical profile of use of the term 'design
process', which whispers into appearance about 1935 but only starts to
emerge after 1960 - a very recent phenomenon - and peaks around 1990 with
references to design in general.
Best wishes,
Terry
---
Dr Terence Love
PhD(UWA), BA(Hons) Engin. PGCEd, FDRS, AMIMechE, MISI
Director,
Love Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks
Western Australia 6030
Tel: +61 (0)4 3497 5848
Fax:+61 (0)8 9305 7629
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