Words Over Time / word page
depression
A record of how one word branches through seven centuries, from loweredness and melancholy to economy, diagnosis, and public discourse.
- ngram
- 1500-2022
- lexical
- 1300-1930
- archive
- 1621-1930
- modern
- 2012-2026
01 / HISTORICAL SEMANTIC PLATE
Geometric semantic anatomy
The spine runs from c.1300 to the present. Branches mark where a sense of the word first becomes visible in the evidence. Width reflects corpus frequency, not importance.
02 / MODERN SEMANTIC MACHINE
Depression as a semantic machine
Each gear is a subsystem through which depression passes in modern usage. Gear size maps to semantic weight. Motion travels only through explicit relation groups; the center is a hinge, not the engine.
The machine shows how the word is held in place. But depression also keeps moving, outward into social life, loosened from any single system. The next loop maps that diffusion: through affect, economy, burnout, media, and care.
03 / SOCIAL ATMOSPHERE LOOP
Depression as a social atmosphere
Each domain reshapes what the word can do. What stays intact in lived experience gets compressed in clinical measurement, amplified in public health reporting, or distorted by the time it reaches media circulation. The matrix records those changes.
04 / SEMANTIC TRANSLATION
Semantic translation field
Each point is a piece of the word, placed by the system it passed through and what happened to it there. Where fragments gather, the word is most stable. Where they thin out or distort, something is lost or bent.
Chart 04 treats depression as something that changes shape when it passes between systems. Lived experience can remain emotionally dense, clinical language can make it measurable, public health can amplify it as a population signal, and media circulation can bend it into a simplified social marker. The chart does not decide which version is true; it shows how each system preserves some of the word while losing, compressing, or intensifying other parts.
Final register
Depression does not end here as one settled object. It remains a word that can name a body state, a clinical threshold, an economic fall, a public mood, a workplace atmosphere, or a route toward care. What the page leaves visible is the movement between those uses: each system makes the word useful by narrowing it, and each narrowing leaves something outside the frame.