Today I had to decide whether a dowager in 1801 would have been more likely to “draw near” or “draw nigh.” It was easy. I mean, really easy. A few years ago, when it was merely somewhat easy, I would have been forced to rely on the little voice inside me that whispered, “Come on, bonehead, only trashy romance novels have characters drawing nigh, usually as they unfrock their comely bosoms.” But today I found my answer by heading straight to Google Ngram Viewer.

Do you ever use this remarkable language tool? I generally get blank stares when I mention it to people. But it’s well worth experimenting with, even if you’re not a writer.

Ngram Viewer is a byproduct of Google’s mass absorption of the world’s published works, more or less from Gutenberg to the present. Billions of words and phrases from millions of books now reside in Google’s chronological database.

An ngram, which sounds like something out of Scientology, is a unit of language — where n is the number of words in the phrase you want to study. Type in your word or phrase, choose the language database you want to search (your options include British, American, and other flavors of English), and specify the time span you’re interested in. Google then looks at all phrases of similar length in all books and journals within your chosen period, and calculates the percentage of phrases that match yours. This is usually a tiny fraction of 1 percent, many zeroes past the decimal point and not illuminating in itself (unless the number happens to be straight zeroes — that tells you a lot). But when many such percentages are graphed over time, as happens in Ngram Viewer, you get a userful snapshot of the term’s frequency in print as it went in and out of fashion.

Ngram Viewer would have helped the Downton Abbey people avoid some verbal gaffes — like “get shafted,” a phrase we are to believe Thomas the footman would have uttered in 1918. Computer says: No. Not before the 1960s.

You can trace several terms at once, as I did with “draw near” and “draw nigh,” to compare their fortunes over time. In publications from 1801, “draw near” was the clear favorite. Just as I suspected.

But one question still nagged me: Did I really want to use either of those phrases? They sounded so . . . prissy. I enlisted another cool Ngram Viewer feature: beneath the graph were links to the original publications, arranged by year, showing the context in which each phrase was used. Both terms, including the more popular “draw near,” were most common in fusty devotional texts: A Selection of Hymns from the Best Authors (1796), The Whole Works of the Late Rev. Mr. Ebenezer Erskine (1798), The Scotch Minister’s Assistant (1802). The little voice was right: “draw near” would have had an inch of dust on it even in 1801.

Would you like to know what my dowager did instead of draw nigh or near? She “trotted up the garden path,” of course.