According to Google NGram from 1500 - 2019 AD, use of the word "faith" in English spiked tremendously in 1581, 1587, 1651 (largest), 1664, and 1675. Also, there was a much greater use of the word from ~1600 to ~1775. What events, movements, or publications might have fueled these occurrences?

by We_Are_Belov3d

For those who don't know, Google NGram graphs the use of words or phrases in published books over time.

Here's the link to the diagram for "faith," 1500 AD - 2019 AD.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Faith&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=0

Contango42

Something weird is going on with that Google ngram visualization.

Try searching for "computer", "television" or "electronics" and it brings up huge spikes in the 1500's and 1600's as well. This appears to be the same for all technical words.

Setting aside the possibility of a bug in Google's code, perhaps linked to date parsing (a notoriously difficult issue to get right), I suspect that it might be something to do with percentage vs. absolutes. There can be huge spikes in the word "faith" as a percentage of all words, but as more words get published for more technical areas, the percentage of any word drops towards zero.

Source: I am a professional programmer with a background in statistics.