After a fifty year career entirely devoted to statistical linguistics, the author attempts to establish a report on this discipline, at least for the French area. He first seeks to evoke the raw intitiatives that involve among other names Guiraud, Quemada Gougenheim, Tournier and Muller. Then he follows the evolution of methods which tend to move away from the inferential model advocated by Muller to adopt a descriptive approach where the analysis is based on multidimensional calculations. Passing from the calculator on the computer software tool developed its power on big size corpus, some of which are subject to particular scrutiny: the BNF, Frantext, SketchEngine and finally Google Books. The size of this last project - which is almost 100 billion words for the French production of the last two centuries - may make you dizzy judgment without erasing doubt, the composition of the corpus, uneven and uncertain, distorting the timeline. It is concluded that the blinding evidence of a graphic result should not impose on the reason. The effect can be massive, and the cause obscure. The lexicometry spread much surface; he must also gain depth.