brace vs span

brace

noun
  • A rope reeved through a block at the end of a yard, by which the yard is moved horizontally; also, a rudder gudgeon. 

  • Harness; warlike preparation. 

  • That which holds anything tightly or supports it firmly; a bandage or a prop. 

  • A cord, ligament, or rod, for producing or maintaining tension. 

  • The state of being braced or tight; tension. 

  • A piece of material used to transmit, or change the direction of, weight or pressure; any one of the pieces, in a frame or truss, which divide the structure into triangular parts. It may act as a tie, or as a strut, and serves to prevent distortion of the structure, and transverse strains in its members. A boiler brace is a diagonal stay, connecting the head with the shell. 

  • A system of wires, brackets, and elastic bands used to correct crooked teeth or to reduce overbite. 

  • Straps or bands to sustain trousers; suspenders. 

  • Two goals scored by one player in a game. 

  • A pair, a couple; originally used of dogs, and later of animals generally (e.g., a brace of conies) and then other things, but rarely human persons. (The plural in this sense is unchanged.) In British use (as plural), this is a particularly common reference to game birds. 

  • A curved, pointed line, also known as "curly bracket": { or } connecting two or more words or lines, which are to be considered together, such as in {role, roll}; in music, used to connect staves. 

  • A curved instrument or handle of iron or wood, for holding and turning bits, etc.; a bitstock. 

  • A thong used to regulate the tension of a drum. 

  • The mouth of a shaft. 

verb
  • To bind or tie closely; to fasten tightly. 

  • To furnish with braces; to support; to prop. 

  • To stop someone for questioning, usually said of police. 

  • To confront with questions, demands or requests. 

  • To draw tight; to tighten; to put in a state of tension; to strain; to strengthen. 

  • To prepare for something bad, such as an impact or blow. 

  • To place in a position for resisting pressure; to hold firmly. 

  • To swing round the yards of a square rigged ship, using braces, to present a more efficient sail surface to the direction of the wind. 

span

noun
  • A rope having its ends made fast so that a purchase can be hooked to the bight; also, a rope made fast in the center so that both ends can be used. 

  • The space of all linear combinations of something. 

  • A portion of something by length; a subsequence. 

  • A small space or a brief portion of time. 

  • The spread or extent of an arch or between its abutments, or of a beam, girder, truss, roof, bridge, or the like, between supports. 

  • The time required to execute a parallel algorithm on an infinite number of processors, i.e. the shortest distance across a directed acyclic graph representing the computation steps. 

  • wingspan of a plane or bird 

  • The length of a cable, wire, rope, chain between two consecutive supports. 

  • Any of various traditional units of length approximating this distance, especially the English handspan of 9 inches forming ⅛ fathom and equivalent to 22.86 cm. 

  • A pair of horses or other animals driven together; usually, such a pair of horses when similar in color, form, and action. 

  • The full width of an open hand from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger used as an informal unit of length. 

verb
  • To extend through the distance between or across. 

  • To extend through (a time period). 

  • To measure by the span of the hand with the fingers extended, or with the fingers encompassing the object. 

  • To generate an entire space by means of linear combinations. 

  • To fetter, as a horse; to hobble. 

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