The research magazine Scientific American has counted its most popular words throughout all its issues, from 1845 (left) to 2020 (right). | Graphic: Moritz Stefaner und Christian Lässer

Language constructs the world. Or does the world perhaps construct language? The editors of the research magazine Scientific American have turned this philosophical question into a series of images. They counted up the most popular words used in their 5,107 issues from the year 1845 (left) to today (right), and depicted the results in graphic form. Every line stands for a word. It becomes clearly visible how different terms used to be popular in earlier times (the grey area) and today (violet). But it’s up to us to decide what changed first: language, or the real world?