balk vs negative

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. 

negative

verb
  • To refuse; to veto. 

  • To contradict. 

  • To disprove. 

  • To make ineffective; to neutralize, to negate. 

noun
  • Refusal or withholding of assents; prohibition, veto 

  • A repetition performed with a weight in which the muscle begins at maximum contraction and is slowly extended; a movement performed using only the eccentric phase of muscle movement. 

  • The negative plate of a voltaic or electrolytic cell. 

  • A right of veto. 

  • An unfavorable point or characteristic. 

  • A word that indicates negation. 

  • A negative quantity. 

  • An image in which dark areas represent light ones, and the converse. 

intj
  • No; nay. 

adj
  • Often preceded by emotion, energy, feeling, or thought: to be avoided, bad, difficult, disagreeable, painful, potentially damaging, unpleasant, unwanted. 

  • Characterized by the presence of features which do not support a hypothesis. 

  • Less than zero degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit. 

  • Damaging; undesirable; unfavourable. 

  • Of or relating to a photographic image in which the colours of the original, and the relations of left and right, are reversed. 

  • Of electrical charge of an electron and related particles 

  • Denying a proposition. 

  • Not positive nor neutral. 

  • HIV negative. 

  • COVID-19 negative. 

  • Pessimistic; not tending to see the bright side of things. 

  • Of a number: less than zero 

  • Metalloidal, nonmetallic; contrasted with positive or basic. 

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