approve vs cancel

approve

verb
  • To officially sanction; to ratify; to confirm; to set as satisfactory. 

  • To make profit of; to convert to one's own profit — said especially of waste or common land appropriated by the lord of the manor. 

  • To consider worthy (to); to be pleased (with); to accept. 

  • To regard as good; to commend; to be pleased with; to think well of. 

cancel

verb
  • To invalidate or annul something. 

  • To cross out something with lines etc. 

  • To offset or equalize something. 

  • To kill. 

  • To remove a common factor from both the numerator and denominator of a fraction, or from both sides of an equation. 

  • To cease to provide financial or moral support to (someone deemed unacceptable). Compare cancel culture. 

  • To stop production of a programme. 

  • To mark something (such as a used postage stamp) so that it can't be reused. 

noun
  • A cancellation (US); (nonstandard in some kinds of English). 

  • The page thus suppressed. 

  • A control message posted to Usenet that serves to cancel a previously posted message. 

  • The page that replaces it. 

  • The suppression on striking out of matter in type, or of a printed page or pages. 

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