cable vs rope

cable

noun
  • A strong, large-diameter wire or rope, or something resembling such a rope. 

  • 100 fathoms, 600 imperial feet, approximately 185 m. 

  • A strong rope or chain used to moor or anchor a ship. 

  • An assembly of two or more wires, used for electrical power or data circuits; one or more and/or the whole may be insulated. 

  • An assembly of two or more cable-laid ropes. 

  • The currency pair British Pound against United States Dollar. 

  • A telegram, notably when sent by (submarine) telegraph cable. 

  • A system for transmitting television or Internet services over a network of coaxial or fibreoptic cables. 

  • A unit of length equal to one tenth of a nautical mile. 

  • A textural pattern achieved by passing groups of stitches over one another. 

  • A moulding, shaft of a column, or any other member of convex, rounded section, made to resemble the spiral twist of a rope. 

verb
  • To communicate by cable 

  • To provide with cable(s) 

  • To ornament with cabling. 

  • To wrap wires to form a cable 

  • To fasten (as if) with cable(s) 

  • To create cable stitches. 

  • To send a telegram, news, etc., by cable 

rope

noun
  • Thick strings, yarn, monofilaments, metal wires, or strands of other cordage that are twisted together to form a stronger line. 

  • A cohesive strand of something. 

  • A kind of chaff (material dropped to interfere with radar) consisting of foil strips with paper chutes attached. 

  • A shot of semen that a man releases during ejaculation. 

  • Cordage of at least 1 inch in diameter, or a length of such cordage. 

  • A data structure resembling a string, using a concatenation tree in which each leaf represents a character. 

  • A necklace of at least 1 meter in length. 

  • A hard line drive. 

  • The small intestines. 

  • Semen being ejaculated. 

  • Death by hanging. 

  • An individual length of such material. 

  • A unit of distance equivalent to the distance covered in six months by a god flying at ten million miles per second. 

  • A long thin segment of soft clay, either extruded or formed by hand. 

  • Rohypnol. 

verb
  • To commit suicide, particularly by hanging. 

  • To throw a rope (or something similar, e.g. a lasso, cable, wire, etc.) around (something). 

  • To climb by means of a rope or ropes. 

  • To tie (something) with rope. 

  • To be formed into rope; to draw out or extend into a filament or thread. 

  • My life is a mess; I might as well rope. 

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