Decent @snopes treatment of "shanty" vs. "chanty"/"chantey" by @davidpmikkelson. But the Google Ngrams graph with spelling variants is misleading, since the frequency of "shanty" is significantly boosted by its other meaning ("crudely built shelter"). 1/5 https://twitter.com/snopes/status/1362145567619633156
To screen out the other meaning of "shanty," you can do a search on "sea shanty/chantey/chanty" instead. For the overall Google Ngrams corpus, you can see "sea chantey" had a historical advantage over "sea shanty," though they're roughly even by 2000. 2/5 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sea+shanty%2Csea+chanty%2Csea+chantey&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csea%20shanty%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csea%20chanty%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csea%20chantey%3B%2Cc0
But you can dig down further, since Google Ngrams allows you to look at British English vs. American English subcorpora. The American usage has historically been dominated by "sea chantey" rather than "sea shanty." 3/5 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sea+shanty%2Csea+chanty%2Csea+chantey&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=28&smoothing=3
Searching on the UK subcorpus of Google Ngrams, meanwhile, reveals that British usage has been dominated by "sea shanty" (true for Commonwealth countries as well). 4/5 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sea+shanty%2Csea+chanty%2Csea+chantey&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=29&smoothing=3
For more on the evolution of these spelling variants, see my @WSJ column on "shanty" (now by far the most common form, even if US dictionaries continue to give "chantey" as the primary spelling). 5/5 https://twitter.com/bgzimmer/status/1355607829089017858
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