climax vs decline

climax

verb
  • To reach or bring to a climax (in any sense). 

noun
  • A rhetorical device in which a series is arranged in ascending order. 

  • The final term of a rhetorical climax. 

  • The culmination of sexual pleasure, an orgasm. 

  • A culmination or acme: the last term in an ascending series 

  • The culmination of a narrative's rising action, the turning point. 

  • The culmination of ecological development, whereby species are in equilibrium with their environment. 

decline

verb
  • To turn or bend aside; to deviate; to stray; to withdraw. 

  • To choose not to do something; refuse, forbear, refrain. 

  • To run through from first to last; to recite in order as though declining a noun. 

  • To cause to decrease or diminish. 

  • To bend downward; to bring down; to depress; to cause to bend, or fall. 

  • To move downwards, to fall, to drop. 

  • To inflect for case, number, gender, and the like. 

  • To reject a penalty against the opposing team, usually because the result of accepting it would benefit the non-penalized team less than the preceding play. 

  • To become weaker or worse. 

  • To recite all the different declined forms of (a word). 

noun
  • A weakening. 

  • Downward movement, fall. 

  • A reduction or diminution of activity. 

  • The act of declining or refusing something. 

  • A sloping downward, e.g. of a hill or road. 

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