climax vs maximum

climax

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

  • 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. 

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

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

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

maximum

noun
  • The highest limit. 

  • A scoring shot for 6 runs. 

  • The greatest value of a set or other mathematical structure, especially the global maximum or a local maximum of a function. 

  • A 147 break; the highest possible break. 

  • A score of 180 with three darts. 

  • An upper bound of a set which is also an element of that set. 

  • The largest value of a batch or sample or the upper bound of a probability distribution. 

adj
  • To the highest degree. 

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