balk vs bar

balk

verb
  • To refuse suddenly. 

  • To stop short and refuse to go on. 

  • To leave heaped up; to heap up in piles. 

  • To omit, miss, or overlook by chance. 

  • To leave or make balks in. 

  • To make a deceptive motion to deceive another player. 

  • To stop, check, block. 

  • To indicate to fishermen, by shouts or signals from shore, the direction taken by the shoals of herring. 

  • To engage in contradiction; to be in opposition. 

  • To disappoint; to frustrate. 

noun
  • Beam, crossbeam; squared timber; a tie beam of a house, stretching from wall to wall, especially when laid so as to form a loft, "the balks". 

  • The wall of earth at the edge of an excavation. 

  • The area of the table lying behind the baulk line. 

  • A sudden and obstinate stop. 

  • A hindrance or disappointment; a check. 

  • The rope by which fishing nets are fastened together. 

  • The area of the table lying behind the line from which the cue ball is initially shot, and from which a ball in hand must be played. 

  • An illegal motion by the pitcher, intended to deceive a runner. 

  • A motion used to deceive the opponent during a serve. 

  • An uncultivated ridge formed in the open field system, caused by the action of ploughing. 

bar

verb
  • To prohibit. 

  • To obstruct the passage of (someone or something). 

  • To imprint or paint with bars, to stripe. 

  • To lock or bolt with a bar. 

prep
  • Except, other than, besides. 

  • Denotes the minimum odds offered on other horses not mentioned by name. 

noun
  • An establishment offering cosmetic services. 

  • Premises or a counter serving any type of beverage. 

  • A solid metal object with uniform (round, square, hexagonal, octagonal or rectangular) cross-section; in the US its smallest dimension is ¹⁄₄ inch or greater, a piece of thinner material being called a strip. 

  • The space between the tusks and grinders in the upper jaw of a horse, in which the bit is placed. 

  • A ridge or succession of ridges of sand or other substance, especially a formation extending across the mouth of a river or harbor or off a beach, and which may obstruct navigation. (FM 55-501). 

  • The central divider between the inner and outer table of a backgammon board, where stones are placed if they are hit. 

  • A broad shaft, band, or stripe. 

  • The bar exam, the legal licensing exam. 

  • A drilling or tamping rod. 

  • A counter, or simply a cabinet, from which alcoholic drinks are served in a private house or a hotel room. 

  • An addition to a military medal, on account of a subsequent act. 

  • A dividing line (physical or notional) in the chamber of a legislature beyond which only members and officials may pass. 

  • A solid, more or less rigid object of metal or wood with a uniform cross-section smaller than its length. 

  • A long, narrow drawn or printed rectangle, cuboid or cylinder, especially as used in a bar code or a bar chart. 

  • A similar sign indicating that the charge on a particle is the negative of its usual value (and that consequently the particle is in fact an antiparticle). 

  • A non-SI unit of pressure equal to 100,000 pascals, approximately equal to atmospheric pressure at sea level. 

  • The counter of such premises. 

  • The sign indicating that the characteristic of a logarithm is negative, conventionally placed above the digit(s) to show that it applies to the characteristic only and not to the mantissa. 

  • A metasyntactic variable representing an unspecified entity, often the second in a series, following foo. 

  • The crossbar. 

  • Any level of achievement regarded as a challenge to be overcome. 

  • A vertical line across a musical staff dividing written music into sections, typically of equal durational value. 

  • A linear shoaling landform feature within a body of water. 

  • An establishment where alcohol and sometimes other refreshments are served. 

  • Collectively, lawyers or the legal profession; specifically applied to barristers in some countries, but including all lawyers in others. 

  • One of the ordinaries in heraldry; a diminutive of a fess. 

  • Any of various lines used as punctuation or diacritics, such as the pipe ⟨|⟩, fraction bar (as in 12), and strikethrough (as in Ⱥ), formerly (obsolete) including oblique marks such as the slash. 

  • Anything that obstructs, hinders, or prevents; an obstruction; a barrier. 

  • The part of the crust of a horse's hoof which is bent inwards towards the frog at the heel on each side, and extends into the centre of the sole. 

  • A city gate, in some British place names. 

  • An informal establishment selling food to be consumed on the premises. 

  • A business selling alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises, or the premises themselves; a public house. 

  • One of those musical sections. 

  • A vein or dike crossing a lode. 

  • A cuboid piece of any solid commodity. 

  • One of an array of bar-shaped symbols that display the level of something, such as wireless signal strength or battery life remaining. 

  • A gatehouse of a castle or fortified town. 

  • A horizontal pole that must be crossed in the high jump and pole vault. 

  • An official order or pronouncement that prohibits some activity. 

  • A measure of drugs, typically one ounce. 

  • The railing surrounding the part of a courtroom in which the judges, lawyers, defendants and witnesses stay. 

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