balk vs declaim

balk

verb
  • To engage in contradiction; to be in opposition. 

  • 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 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. 

declaim

verb
  • To object to something vociferously; to rail against in speech. 

  • To recite, e.g., poetry, in a theatrical way; to speak for rhetorical display; to speak pompously, noisily, or theatrically; bemouth; to make an empty speech; to rehearse trite arguments in debate; to rant. 

  • To speak rhetorically; to make a formal speech or oration; specifically, to recite a speech, poem, etc., in public as a rhetorical exercise; to practice public speaking. 

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