we’ll know that the program of quantitative corpus research is successful when the engineers have stepped back as the techniques are absorbed into the academy, sometimes as a method, sometimes just as a background of operating assumptions. That was the fate of 19th-century philology—the study of “La Vie des Mots” (The Life of Words) in the title of a book of the period by Arsène Darmesteter. Quantitative corpus studies are destined to play the same role, though they imply a different understanding of what the life of words is all about. We really don’t even need a name like “culturomics,” or any new name at all: this is just e-philology. (Or “the newer philology,” since “the new philology” is taken.)