background vs past tense

background

noun
  • Information relevant to the current situation about past events; history. 

  • One's social heritage, or previous life; what one did in the past. 

  • The image or color over which a computer's desktop items are shown (e.g. icons or application windows). 

  • A part of the picture that depicts scenery to the rear or behind the main subject; context. 

  • A less important feature of scenery (as opposed to foreground). 

  • A type of activity on a computer that is not normally visible to the user. 

verb
  • To put in a position that is not prominent. 

  • To gather and provide background information (on). 

adj
  • Less important or less noticeable in a scene or system. 

past tense

noun
  • A grammatical form (often a verb form) that refers to an event, transaction, occurrence, or object that happened (or had happened), or existed, at some time before now (the applicable reference time). 

  • A grammatical form (often a verb form) that is used in a conditional expression to refer to an event, transaction, occurrence, or object that is hypothetical and often counterfactual. 

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