belly vs stave

belly

noun
  • The hollow part of a curved or bent timber, the convex part of which is the back. 

  • The stomach. 

  • The main curved portion of a knife blade. 

  • The abdomen, especially a fat one. 

  • The part of anything which resembles (either closely or abstractly) the human belly in protuberance or in concavity; often, the fundus (innermost part). 

  • The womb. 

  • The lower fuselage of an airplane. 

verb
  • To swell and become protuberant; to bulge or billow. 

  • To cause to swell out; to fill. 

  • To position one’s belly; to move on one’s belly. 

stave

noun
  • One of a number of narrow strips of wood, or narrow iron plates, placed edge to edge to form the sides, covering, or lining of a vessel or structure; especially, one of the strips which form the sides of a cask, barrel, pail, etc. 

  • The initial consonant, consonant cluster, or vowel of a word which rhymes with another word with the same consonant or vowel in stave-rhyme. 

  • A sign, symbol or sigil, including rune or rune-like characters, used in Icelandic magic. 

  • One of the bars or rounds of a rack, rungs of a ladder, etc; one of the cylindrical bars of a lantern wheel 

  • The five horizontal and parallel lines on and between which musical notes are written or pointed; the staff. 

  • A staff or walking stick. 

  • A metrical portion; a stanza; a staff. 

verb
  • To render impervious or solid by driving with a calking iron. 

  • To suffer, or cause to be lost by breaking the cask. 

  • To push, or keep off, as with a staff. 

  • To fit or furnish with staves or rundles. 

  • To delay by force or craft; to drive away. 

  • To break in the staves of; to break a hole in; to burst. 

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