contend vs sentence

contend

verb
  • To be in debate; to engage in discussion; to dispute; to argue. 

  • To be in opposition; to contest; to dispute; to vie; to quarrel; to fight. 

  • To believe (something is reasonable) and argue (for it); to advocate. 

  • To struggle or exert oneself to obtain or retain possession of, or to defend. 

  • contend with: To try to cope with a difficulty or problem. 

sentence

verb
  • To decree, announce, or pass as a sentence. 

  • To declare a sentence on a convicted person; to condemn to punishment. 

noun
  • A grammatically complete series of words consisting of a subject and predicate, even if one or the other is implied, and typically beginning with a capital letter and ending with a full stop or other punctuation. 

  • A punishment imposed on a person convicted of a crime. 

  • The judicial order for a punishment to be imposed on a person convicted of a crime. 

  • Any of the set of strings that can be generated by a given formal grammar. 

  • A formula with no free variables. 

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