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According to the following Google Ngram, in the U.K. the modals should, shall, and must were virtually missing from English writing during the 18th Century (I've added will for a comparison modal which was unaffected).

I have never seen this mentioned anywhere, and I couldn't find it in a brief web search. What happened? Was this a real phenomenon, or could this somehow be an artifact of Google Ngrams? Were these modals absent from speech, or just formal writing? More interestingly, how did they get reintroduced? A brief search shows that Shakespeare definitely used these words quite frequently.

enter image description here

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What a fascinating question! – hippietrail Aug 28 '11 at 20:22
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@PeterShor: NGram is a fine tool, but what about a more mechanistic interpretation or the data... It seems to me that there is continuous decline the use of all these words after 1825 which is an absurd. What has replaced their use? What has come up in lieu of "will" or "shall"? Do people use the future tense less and less? (Maybe it suggests a manifestation of massive pessimism... ) – Pantelis Sopasakis Sep 13 '11 at 21:00
See these two brilliant articles from 2006 that exploit this "feature" of Google Book Search and Google Ngrams: The Rules for Long S and The Long and the Short of the Letter S. – ShreevatsaR Sep 23 '11 at 4:56
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Interesting! I suspected the reason was that the character s used to be written somewhat like the present-day f. (It would look like s only when it was the last character of a word.) I looked at some of the OCRed documents that Google Ngrams links to. That only strengthened my suspicion.

Look at this plot (also below). I have plotted for "should,shall,must,will,fhould,fhall,muft".

We had some very important literary works between the late 1500s and the early 1600s. I guess these have been re-published with the old-fashioned s replaced, and therefore, OCR worked better.

added fhall,fhould,muft, and extended the range

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It looks like this is right! ngrams.googlelabs.com/… shows that the fall of should is accompanied by an equal rise in fhould, etc. – Jeremy Aug 28 '11 at 15:03
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@Prof. Shor: One important (to me) consequence is that it shows why we can't rely on (just) Google NGrams to settle questions about early Modern English. – prash Aug 28 '11 at 17:16
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Great answer to a great question. The version of "s" that looks like "f" is called "long s" and Google's OCR definitely doesn't detect them at all. I tried with ſhould,ſhall,muſt and got zero. – hippietrail Aug 28 '11 at 20:30
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@prash can you include the plot in your answer? that way both images can be compared from this single Q&A. – DuckMaestro Aug 28 '11 at 20:33
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@DuckMaestro: I now figured out how it's done! – prash Aug 28 '11 at 20:41
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