Are there any websites that show you the popularity and regional use of words?
There are some words and phrases in my manuscript that I think are used in America. However, a beta reader tells me my character sounds British. Are there any online sources I can use to check the popularity of a word or phrase and/or where it is used?
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I recommend The Corpus of Contemporary American English (and for BrE its sister the British National Corpus). It's a very powerful tool, supporting wildcards, part of speech tagging, grouping by lemma (e.g. dies, dying, and died can all be grouped with die), and the ability to see the context of what texts matched.
As an aside I'll note that I don't like using Google NGrams for dialects, since they classify texts based on where they were published (and probably sometimes the classification is just wrong, as I clearly see all too often with dates), leading to a pretty big amount of error in my experience. I explain more about that here.
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Google's Ngram Viewer can be used to show the relative popularity of a word or phrase in its various collections over time, and it does have American and British English corpora.
E.g. 'mum' comes in at 0.00001% in the American English corpus in 2000, and 0.00003% in British English, so one can surmise it's a British spelling; 'freak out' is distinctly American, at 0.000012% compared to the British 0.000004%.
There is, of course, a degree of cross-pollination, especially with more recent data, but it's a good starting point.
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