← Whose Word Was It

Chapter 3 of 8

CHAPTER THREEThe word for the people

Over the same century the papers changed what they called the people. Arab gave way to Palestinian, and the two cross in the 1970s.

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% Arab Palestinian 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s
Share of this archive’s headlines containing each word, by decade. n = 3,517 headlines.

FROM OUTSIDE

The crossover is not an artifact of this collection. In the American press at large, palestine outruns palestinian by 40 to one in the 1930s and is overtaken by it in the 1970s, where palestinian returns 1,356,579 pages against 1,056,809. By the 2000s palestinian appears at 3,893 pages per 100,000 against 69 in the 1930s.

One confound, published with the figure. Palestine is also a town in Texas, and in Illinois, and in Arkansas. Every external Palestine count is inflated by an unknown amount of American local news. The Palestinian series carries no such confound, which is why the finding leans on it.

The word for the same people, forty years apart. In this archive Arab falls from 47.6% of 1940s headlines to 1.0% of the 2020s. It almost disappears. An earlier version of this finding said zero, which was wrong.

This research is still being worked through. Every count drawn from the archive is recomputed from the records each time the page is built, and every figure from outside it is printed with the query that produced it. Where a finding has changed, the correction is printed beside it rather than quietly swapped in. More of it is still being checked, and some of it will move.

Last updated 2 November 2026

Every figure about this archive is computed from the records at build time. Every figure from outside it is logged with the query that produced it.
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Collected, transcribed and checked by Maria Robles · maria@rozumstudio.com