What can an anachronism checker catch?

Concrete, datable claims: products, technology, prices, songs and shows, laws, place names and events that arrive too late for the date of the scene. A good checker shows the evidence and a source for every finding, so you can verify it rather than take it on trust.

What will an anachronism checker miss?

Slang and idiom that sound too modern, regional usage, attitudes, and any detail the passage never ties to a date. A checker reading one passage also cannot see a year you set chapters earlier unless you tell it. Run a separate dialogue pass by ear and with a historical dictionary.

Is there a free anachronism checker?

Yes. Storskarvia's free anachronism checker takes up to 1,500 words of period fiction or screenplay, with no account, and returns cited findings or a single line saying nothing was found. It writes no prose and suggests no rewrites.

Guides

How to Run an Anachronism Check on Your Manuscript

Knowing the traps is half the job. The other half is a check you can actually run on a page: list what can be dated, date it, and read the result as a punch list. Here is one, worked from start to finish on a short scene.

The test passage

Our guide to avoiding anachronisms covers why period errors survive rereads. This one is practical. Here is a scene set in Chicago in December 1936, written the way a first draft gets written, fast and from memory:

Ruth paid the cabbie a quarter and ran for the lobby of the Palmer House, her nylons already laddered from the slush. Upstairs, Walt had Benny Goodman on the radio and a bottle of Coca-Cola sweating on the sill. He was reading the Tribune under a fluorescent desk lamp. "Dad says Roosevelt's finished," he said, without looking up. Ruth took the ballpoint from his pocket and wrote down the address. "Don't stress," he said. "We'll eat at the automat."

Read it once for pleasure. Nothing jumps out. That is the point.

Step one: inventory everything datable

Go through the passage and pull out every noun, name, number and phrase that belongs to a particular time. Do not judge yet; you are building a list. This scene gives you thirteen:

Objects: nylons, a Coca-Cola bottle, a radio, a fluorescent desk lamp, a ballpoint pen.
Names and places: the Palmer House, the Tribune, Benny Goodman, the automat.
Money: a quarter for the cab.
Events: Roosevelt being "finished."
Language: "laddered," "don't stress."

Under eighty words, thirteen claims. A full chapter will carry hundreds, which is why the check needs a method.

Step two: date each one against a source

Now take the list one line at a time and find something you can point at: a manufacturer's history, a newspaper of the month, a historical dictionary. Your memory does not count, because your memory wrote the draft. Here is how this scene comes out:

Nylons: wrong. DuPont's nylon stockings were first sold in Wilmington, Delaware, in October 1939 and went on sale nationally in May 1940. In 1936 Ruth is wearing silk or rayon.
Fluorescent lamp: wrong, by two years. General Electric and Westinghouse began selling fluorescent lamps in 1938. The near misses are the dangerous ones, because they feel right for the decade.
Ballpoint: wrong. László Bíró patented his pen in 1938, and ballpoints did not go on sale in American department stores until late 1945. Walt carries a fountain pen or a pencil.
Benny Goodman: fine. He had been on national network radio since the end of 1934.
The radio, the Coca-Cola bottle, the Tribune, the Palmer House: fine. Coke had been bottled since the 1890s, the Tribune was founded in 1847, and the Palmer House has been a Chicago hotel since 1871.
Roosevelt: a judgment call. In November 1936 Roosevelt won re-election carrying 46 of 48 states. Walt's father can still say he is finished, but in December 1936 that line makes him a crank. Characters may be wrong; the book should only be wrong on purpose.
The automat: right decade, open question on the city. The automats most people picture were Horn & Hardart's, in Philadelphia and New York. Before Walt takes Ruth to one in Chicago, find out whether there was one to take her to.
A quarter for the cab: unverified. Prices are checkable, but only against a local source from the right year, such as a newspaper of that month. Leave it on the list until you have one.
"Laddered": wrong country. A ladder in a stocking is chiefly British. A Chicagoan in 1936 has a run in her stockings.
"Don't stress": wrong era. Stress as an everyday verb for worrying is a late twentieth-century usage. Our guide to catching anachronistic language shows how to date a phrase like this yourself.

Step three: read the result as a punch list

A check is only useful if its output is something you can work through. Write each finding as one line with four parts: the quote, the problem, the evidence, and the source. Then give it a status: fixed, kept on purpose, or still open. For this scene, the list reads:

"her nylons": nylon stockings reached stores in 1939 and 1940. Fixed: "a run in her silk stockings."
"a fluorescent desk lamp": fluorescent lamps were sold from 1938. Fixed: "a gooseneck lamp."
"the ballpoint": on American sale from 1945. Fixed: "his fountain pen."
"Don't stress": modern usage. Fixed: "Don't fret."
"Roosevelt's finished": contradicts the 1936 result. Kept on purpose, to characterize the father.
"the automat" and "a quarter": open, sources needed.

The "kept on purpose" line matters as much as the fixes. When a copy editor queries Walt's father eight months from now, the answer is already written down. The historical accuracy checklist has a fuller version of this log.

What an anachronism checker can and cannot catch

Steps one and two are where a tool earns its keep, because listing and dating a dozen claims per page is slow, and a tool does not get bored on page two hundred. Storskarvia's free anachronism checker does exactly those steps. Paste up to 1,500 words, add the setting ("Chicago, December 1936"), and it lists the real-world claims in the passage, searches Wikipedia and the web for evidence on each, and judges each claim against what it found. Every problem it wants to report then faces a second pass, the Skeptic, which argues against it using the same evidence. What survives reaches you as a card with the quote, the problem, the evidence and a source link, or as one line saying nothing was found. It takes no account, and it writes no prose: Storskarvia never writes a word for you.

It is built for the nylons, the lamp and the ballpoint: concrete things with dates. It is honest about its gaps, and you should be too. Slang and idiom that sound too modern, regional usage like "laddered," attitudes, and details the passage never ties to a date are the usual misses, and a checker reading one passage cannot see a year you set three chapters earlier unless you type it in. Treat every card as a lead to verify, and keep a dialogue pass of your own. If you want to see what the output looks like first, there is an example result on the site.

Make it a routine

Run the check late, once a scene has stopped moving, and run it scene by scene rather than across a whole book in one sitting. Keep the punch list beside the manuscript. When a fix moves a date, rerun the scenes on either side, because a changed year ripples into ages, seasons and letters. A free Storskarvia account checks whole chapters and manuscripts and remembers the year you set in chapter one, so the setting box stops being your job.

Check your whole manuscript free