Googling

I remember the first time I heard someone speaking of googling something. I was already familiar with Google, and I immediately understood the usage, but the incident did give me a start. The verb to google has since become commonplace. Although one could argue that the verb should be capitalized, it usually isn’t, something about which Google should probably be concerned.

I was even more surprised when I encountered what I thought was a very new word in a nineteenth-century novel, namely, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Chapter XXIX contains the following long sentence:

The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was up, but just went a goo-gooing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that’s googling out buttermilk; and as for the king, he just gazed and gazed down sorrowful on them new-comers like it give him the stomach-ache in his very heart to think there could be such frauds and rascals in the world.

My unabridged dictionary does not list google; I don’t know if the usage in Huckleberry Finn was common at the time, was dialect, or was invented by the author. I suspect it was not an invention.

You can amaze your friends by using to google in a sentence in a context that has nothing to do with the Internet.