autonomous vs stand-alone

autonomous

adj
  • Self-governing. Intelligent, sentient, self-aware, thinking, feeling, governing independently. 

  • Acting on one's own or independently; of a child, acting without being governed by parental or guardian rules. 

  • Used with no subject, indicating an unknown or unspecified agent; used in similar situations as the passive in English (the difference being that the theme in the English passive construction is the subject, while in the Celtic autonomous construction the theme is the object and there is no subject). 

stand-alone

adj
  • Operating, functioning, or existing without additions or assistance; independent; able to be separate or separated. 

noun
  • A device that can operate on its own, rather than as an accessory for another device. 

  • Something that is not a part of some series or sequence. 

How often have the words autonomous and stand-alone occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )