What was up with “Alicorn” in the 1920's and 30's

Question

My question is about the applications of the term "alicorn." What I know is that it's a medieval term used for supposed compounds of unicorn horn. Later Peers Anthony used the term for a horned pegasus/winged unicorn in his books in the 80's. In this century, the My Little Pony franchise adopted that definition too.

I'm clearly missing something, however. If you plug "alicorn" into google ngram, you'll see a massive spike from 1925 to 1934, that dwarfs any of the later uses. What was going on then? Why the sudden jump, and then the equally sudden drop?

Answer 1

This has never been a common term, so few uses can make a large spike in the graph. Google Books (and therefore, Google NGrams) knows about three works from 1930 that apparently use it. Their concentration in time was not immediately obvious because above, you did not turn off the curve smoothing. Here are the text fragments:

... superstitions about the virtue of the alicorn (Unicorn's horn).

... many sources of the unicorn's horn — the " alicorn," as he terms it.

James Alicorn. Accountants