When did the word “Mizzou” start to become popular on the University of Missouri campus? Did the popularity of the Miss Mizzou character in the 1950s and 1960s bolster the usage of the word “Mizzou” over time? I decided to crunch some numbers to see what I could find out.

This is a graph where I listed the mentions of the word “Mizzou” that I searched for in the Missouri Digital Library versions of both the Savitar Yearbook and MU Alumni Magazine. The first use of the word “Mizzou” in print occurred in a 1905 issue of the Missouri Alumni Quarterly and the word was used some over the next few decades as you can see in the graph. It seems that the Alumni Magazine started using the word Mizzou a lot starting in the 1970s and it skyrockets when the University officially trademarks the name in 2004 for branding purposes.

If you take a closer look at the data pre-1971, a different picture emerges. The two data points occasionally mesh up to form a trend, but overall they seem to differ quite a bit. The one interesting thing I do see here is somewhat of an upward trend in the Savitar in the 1950s and 1960s. Could this have been the influence of Miss Mizzou? Given that the Savitar was a student publication, I think this upward trend during those two decades could show the skyrocketing influence of the term as these students later became alumni in the 1970s and beyond.

Some notes:

• Correlation does not indicate causation. The appearance of Miss Mizzou may have an an effect on the prevalence on the appearance of the word Mizzou, but this data does not definitively show a cause one way or another. This data is presented for fun contemplation, so take it as such.
• The data here is of course influenced by the use of OCR technology that sometimes picks up words in scanned text and sometimes doesn’t. For instance, the technology may have not collected many instances of “Mizzou” that were written in unique display fonts.
• The Savitar Yearbook began publication in 1894 and ended publication in 2005. The Alumni Magazine started in 1905, and is still published today.
• By comparing these two publications I’m afraid I’m comparing apples and oranges at times. The Savitar started off as a small publication and grew in size as the school did, even getting two volumes in some years. Comparatively, the Alumni Magazine has had a much more erratic run; some years it was produced almost monthly, while in the 1980s it finally moved to it’s current quarterly status. From 1969-1973 they played around with their format quite a bit and chopped up the magazine into different sections for various divisions which I think elevated the numbers for those years artificially.
• I call the alumni publication “The Alumni Magazine” here for clarity’s sake but it had various names throughout the years. Originally known as “Missouri Alumni Quarterly” it changed it’s name to “Missouri Alumnus” in 1912, which stuck until 1995 where it was renamed “MIZZOU.”
• It should go without saying that the occurrence of the word “Mizzou” in these publications doesn’t necessarily reflect it’s use in everyday real world situations. Oftentimes staff members of yearbooks and alumni magazines present a certain viewpoint that might not be representative of a University community as a whole.
• I was inspired to do this research from Norm Benedict’s guest post a few weeks back about his Miss Mizzou memories.

Update 04-28-15: One reader wrote me with an interesting thought that did not occur to me as I was putting this data together. In the early part of the 20th century, some people used “Missou” instead of “Mizzou.” It’d be interesting to go through the searching again and add this variation to see how it’d change the chart.