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​Jordan R. Brock

Historical usage of Camelina terms

11/5/2015

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Google's Ngram viewer is a tool which shows prevalence of words used in Google's collection of digitized books. The graph above represents the percent usage of several common names of Camelina sativa (Gold of pleasure or false flax). What is particularly striking about this graph is the higher usage of "Camelina" in literature of the 1800's, with a steady decline for the last 60 years, and now it's starting to increase in use again. This highlights the fact that Camelina fell out of favor as an oil seed crop during the 1900's, only recently to be recognized as a viable biofuel crop. It is also clear that "gold of pleasure" was most widely used around 1780-1900, whereas "false flax" became a popular common name from about 1900-1960. Now, it seems that there is an even split between the two common names "gold of pleasure" and "false flax". 
Above is a graph of the use of "Camelina" and its German common name "Leindotter", which appear to be used interchangeably in German literature. These trends reflect those of the English names; there is a slight reduction in use, but this time starting in the 1920's, and following through until about the 1980's when a resurgence of "Leindotter" occurred. 
While Camelina cultivation halted around the early 1900's in most Western nations, Russia continued to experiment using the cruciferous oil seed. This is reflected by the usage of the Russian word for Camelina (Рыжик), which only started to be used after 1900, and reached a peak around 1940-1980, this corresponds to the time in which usage of "Camelina" was decreasing in the West. Camelina is still grown in Eastern Europe and parts of Russia, but I'm not certain of the extent of use or what the applications are (other than as a cooking oil). 

The prevalence of the word Camelina is much higher in Russia (although I'm sure there could be many biases responsible for this). During the 1960's, use in Russia was at about 0.000045%, whereas the same period in English literature, only 0.0000015%, or put another way, during this time Camelina was mentioned in Russian language books 30 times more than English language books.
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