captain vs chair

captain

verb
  • To act as captain 

  • To exercise command of a ship, aircraft or sports team. 

noun
  • An honorific title given to a prominent person. See colonel. 

  • The head boy of a school. 

  • A maître d', a headwaiter. 

  • A chief or leader. 

  • An army officer with a rank between the most senior grade of lieutenant and major. 

  • A naval officer with a rank between commander and commodore. 

  • The person lawfully in command of a ship or other vessel. 

  • One of the athletes on a sports team who is designated to make decisions, and is allowed to speak for his team with a referee or official. 

  • A commissioned officer in the United States Navy, Coast Guard, NOAA Corps, or PHS Corps of a grade superior to a commander and junior to a rear admiral (lower half). A captain is equal in grade or rank to a United States Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force colonel. 

  • The leader of a group of workers. 

chair

verb
  • To act as chairperson at; to preside over. 

  • To award a chair to (a winning poet) at a Welsh eisteddfod. 

  • To carry in a seated position upon one's shoulders, especially in celebration or victory. 

noun
  • One of two possible conformers of cyclohexane rings (the other being boat), shaped roughly like a chair. 

  • A vehicle for one person; either a sedan borne upon poles, or a two-wheeled carriage drawn by one horse; a gig. 

  • An iron block used on railways to support the rails and secure them to the sleepers, and similar devices. 

  • A distinguished professorship at a university. 

  • The seat or office of a person in authority, such as a judge or bishop. 

  • An item of furniture used to sit on or in, comprising a seat, legs or wheels, back, and sometimes arm rests, for use by one person. Compare stool, couch, sofa, settee, loveseat and bench. 

  • The seating position of a particular musician in an orchestra. 

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