Don’t worry, I’m not going to complain about anything in this post.

I’m not sure exactly when I first ran across the word “whinge,” but I don’t recall having seen it before about 2004.  I may have seen it on rare occasions before then, and just thought it was a misspelling of “whine,” since that would have made perfect sense in context.  But over the past few years it seems like I’ve been seeing the word more frequently.

I thought it might just be an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: after really noticing the word for the first time, I started to see it more.  In other words, the frequency of usage for “whinge” hadn’t changed, but my perception of it had.

When I came across it again recently, I remembered the existence of a tool that would let me check trends in word usage: the Google Ngram Viewer.  It uses its index of books and periodicals to show the frequency of word usage over time.  So I checked “whinge” and “whinging”:

It looks like there’s been a lot more whinging in recent years (the chart ends in 2008.)  The growth really started in the early 1980s, but it took a while before it impinged (impined?) on my consciousness.  So, while it’s true that I may be noticing it more, it’s also true that it’s being used more.

Anyway, feel free to go waste time on the Google Ngram Viewer.