The grooviest words of medieval times

From hepcat to slacks, from right on to whassup, words and phrases have helped novelists and filmmakers evoke a particular time or place. Now, researchers at the University of Toronto have developed software that can carefully and reliably determine the dates of medieval British documents based on the appearance of popular words or phrases. U of T's Centre for Medieval Studies and the Documents of Early England Data Set (DEEDS) Project enlisted the help of Gelila Tilahun to develop software that would decipher their database of about 10,000 British charter and property documents, which are all from approximately 1066 until the 1400s, with the majority being from 1100 to 1300. Tilahun, who was doing her PhD with the Department of Statistical Sciences, created the software that uses the DEEDS database as a source. When her software is given an undated text, it aggregates the probability of occurrence of words and phrases of the text at each time period, and then estimates the date of the text to be the time value that maximizes the aggregated probabilities. Being able to estimate the probability of occurrence of a word or phrase means the evolution of the usage of popular terms can be examined. For example, the form of address "Francis et Anglicis" (French and English) was commonly used by French and English barons to address their workers and/or soldiers from the mid-1100s.