English Lexicon Time Machine

Watch the entire English language blossom from Wiktionary + Google Books N-grams, rendered as a living, breathing prefix galaxy.

How this repo is put together

• Zero-config takeover – ./setup.sh spins up the virtualenv, fetches every dataset, caches the heavy lifts, and ships final MP4/GIF output.
• Radial growth cinematics – the trie erupts from the core alphabet, framing decades of linguistic evolution as a neon fractal.
• Repeatable science – every artifact (lemmata, first-year inference, trie counts, layouts) checkpoints to disk and into a reusable tarball for instant re-renders.
• Battle-tested – streams 26 full 1-gram shards, handles 1.4GB Wiktionary dumps, and renders 220 frames in glorious 1080p.

Share it, remix it, drop it in your next data-viz thread.

Quickstart

cd /Users/grey/Projects/graph-visualizations
bash setup.sh

The script will:

1. Create/upgrade venv/ with Python 3.
2. Download Wiktionary + Google Books 1-gram shards (a–z).
3. Extract English lemmas, infer first-use years, aggregate prefix counts.
4. Render 220 radial frames (outputs/frames/frame-0000.png → frame-0219.png).
5. Encode outputs/english_trie_timelapse.mp4 and a share-ready GIF.

Rerun the script anytime—artifact caching means future passes jump straight to rendering.

Anatomy

Stage	Script	Output
Lemma extraction	src/ingest/wiktionary_extract.py	artifacts/lemmas/lemmas.tsv
First-year inference	src/ingest/ngram_first_year.py	artifacts/years/first_years.tsv
Prefix aggregation	src/build/build_prefix_trie.py	artifacts/trie/prefix_counts.jsonl
Layout generation	src/viz/layout.py	artifacts/layout/prefix_positions.json (legacy back-compat)
Frame rendering	src/viz/render_frames.py	outputs/frames/
Encoding	src/viz/encode.py	outputs/english_trie_timelapse.mp4 + .gif

Render Only (after initial run)

source venv/bin/activate
python -m src.viz.render_frames artifacts/trie/prefix_counts.jsonl outputs/frames
python -m src.viz.encode outputs/frames outputs/english_trie_timelapse.mp4 outputs/english_trie_timelapse.gif

Use flags such as --min-radius, --max-radius, --base-edge-alpha, or --start-progress to tune the vibe.

Neo4j Playground (Optional)

Load artifacts/years/first_years.tsv to explore in Neo4j (Community & Enterprise safe):

:param batch => $rows;
UNWIND $rows AS row
WITH row WHERE row.word IS NOT NULL AND row.word <> ""
MERGE (w:Word {text: row.word})
SET w.first_year = CASE
  WHEN row.first_year = "" THEN NULL
  ELSE toInteger(row.first_year)
END;

Share-Worthy Ideas

• Drop the GIF in language history threads (#linguistics #dataart).
• Remix the radial layout with alternative color ramps or depth cutoffs.
• Pair the timelapse with poetry readings for maximum feels.

Credits

• Wiktionary community & Google Books N-gram team for open data.
• You, for showing the world how beautifully language grows.

Community

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