Betterment and Committedness: When does a word's usage start to expire?

Stick with "improvement" and "commitment" over "betterment and "committedness" if you want your reader to feel comfortable with your word use and choice.  Here's why.

output from https://books.google.com/ngrams



According to Google's Ngram the use of the word "betterment" (as measured by its frequency in Google Books) peaked in 1916 and has been  downhill ever since, perhaps making its use seem like a quaint Britishism to my ears. 









Ngram for improvement, betterment, optimal *
"Improvement" has been yielding its place to the adjective "optimal" partnered up with nouns, which Google lists elsewhere








Examine the distribution of "commitment" versus "committedness": the first has always been more common, but the second has had its up and downs, but when you see the two scaled together, you see that the first has always been the favorite by a large margin. By 2018, the  margin had grown to 100,000:1

Here a few websites to help check whether word choice and usage is typical enough for the average reader to recognize the meaning that you want to convey with a given word. The first resource has a one-page view if you don't have an account. The second, COCA from BYU, now seems to require an account. The third, Google Book's Ngram, requires no login account and turns out to be the most useful when choosing between expressions!

https://ludwig.guru/s/betterment+committedness    (Create an account to see results past the first window)

[Add in jpgs here]

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