abandonment vs decline

abandonment

noun
  • The act of abandoning, or the state of being abandoned; total desertion; relinquishment. 

  • The self-surrender to an outside influence. 

  • Abandon; careless freedom or ease; surrender to one's emotions. 

  • The relinquishment by the insured to the underwriters of what may remain of the property insured after a loss or damage by a peril insured against. 

  • A refusal to receive freight so damaged in transit as to be worthless and render carrier liable for its value. 

  • The voluntary leaving of a person to whom one is bound by a special relation, as a wife, husband or child; desertion. 

  • An abandoned building or structure. 

  • The relinquishment of a right, claim, or privilege; relinquishment of right to secure a patent by an inventor; relinquishment of copyright by an author. 

  • The cessation of service on a particular segment of the lines of a common carrier, as granted by a government agency. 

decline

noun
  • The act of declining or refusing something. 

  • A weakening. 

  • Downward movement, fall. 

  • A reduction or diminution of activity. 

  • A sloping downward, e.g. of a hill or road. 

verb
  • To choose not to do something; refuse, forbear, refrain. 

  • To run through from first to last; to recite in order as though declining a noun. 

  • To cause to decrease or diminish. 

  • To bend downward; to bring down; to depress; to cause to bend, or fall. 

  • To turn or bend aside; to deviate; to stray; to withdraw. 

  • To move downwards, to fall, to drop. 

  • To inflect for case, number, gender, and the like. 

  • To reject a penalty against the opposing team, usually because the result of accepting it would benefit the non-penalized team less than the preceding play. 

  • To become weaker or worse. 

  • To recite all the different declined forms of (a word). 

How often have the words abandonment and decline occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )