contract vs reduce

contract

verb
  • To betroth; to affiance. 

  • To enter into a contract with. 

  • To enter into, with mutual obligations; to make a bargain or covenant for. 

  • To draw together or nearer; to shorten, narrow, or lessen. 

  • To make an agreement or contract; to covenant; to agree; to bargain. 

  • To shorten by omitting a letter or letters or by reducing two or more vowels or syllables to one. 

  • To bring on; to incur; to acquire. 

  • To gain or acquire (an illness). 

  • To draw together so as to wrinkle; to knit. 

noun
  • An order, usually given to a hired assassin, to kill someone. 

  • An agreement which the law will enforce in some way. A legally binding contract must contain at least one promise, i.e., a commitment or offer, by an offeror to and accepted by an offeree to do something in the future. A contract is thus executory rather than executed. 

  • An agreement between two or more parties, to perform a specific job or work order, often temporary or of fixed duration and usually governed by a written agreement. 

  • The document containing such an agreement. 

  • A part of legal studies dealing with laws and jurisdiction related to contracts. 

  • The declarer's undertaking to win the number of tricks bid with a stated suit as trump. 

reduce

verb
  • To humble; to conquer; to subdue; to capture. 

  • To annul by legal means. 

  • To convert to written form. (Usage note: this verb almost always appears as "reduce to writing".) 

  • To lose weight. 

  • To perform a reduction; to restore a fracture or dislocation to the correct alignment. 

  • To bring to an inferior state or condition. 

  • To simplify an equation or formula without changing its value. 

  • To bring to an inferior rank; to degrade, to demote. 

  • To convert a syllogism to a clearer or simpler form. 

  • To add electrons / hydrogen or to remove oxygen. 

  • To bring down the size, quantity, quality, value or intensity of something; to diminish, to lower. 

  • To strike off the payroll. 

  • To decrease the liquid content of food by boiling much of its water off. 

  • To produce metal from ore by removing nonmetallic elements in a smelter. 

  • To express the solution of a problem in terms of another (known) algorithm. 

  • To reform a line or column from (a square). 

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