history - Capitalization of the word universe


Playing around with Google's Ngram viewer, where you can see how many times a word is used in books, I stumbled on this:


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It shows how often universe and Universe have been used in books.


I think it's somewhat interesting that around 1630 the use of these terms took off, and at 1750 there was a switch.


Anyone hazard any guesses to what happened around those years that caused the trends?


EDIT: It looks like the 1750 capitalization issue is more about the search data because the same phenomenon occurs for lots of terms. So maybe just what inspired the use of the word to take off around 1630.



Answer



Perhaps it is just due to the popularisation of science? It makes sense that in the latter years of modern history, more and more people would become familiar with words such as universe due to widespread discussion of extraterrestrial physics and science fiction or due to their learning about scientific theories relating to the universe such as the Big Bang. Capitalisation is often used to denote specialist terminology, and so as the term universe became a word of more and more common usage, its capitalisation was gradually dropped. This is just my theory, however I believe it may have some grounding.


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