contract vs spread

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. 

spread

verb
  • To prepare; to set and furnish with provisions. 

  • To disperse, to scatter or distribute over a given area. 

  • To stretch out, open out (a material etc.) so that it more fully covers a given area of space. 

  • To cover (something) with a thin layer of some substance, as of butter. 

  • To take up a larger area or space; to expand, be extended. 

  • To smear, to distribute in a thin layer. 

  • To proliferate; to become more widely present, to be disseminated. 

  • To disseminate; to cause to proliferate, to make (something) widely known or present. 

  • To extend (individual rays, limbs etc.); to stretch out in varying or opposing directions. 

  • To open one’s legs, especially for sexual favours. 

noun
  • The difference between the prices of two similar items. 

  • An unlimited expanse of discontinuous points. 

  • The difference between the wholesale and retail prices. 

  • The difference between the price of a futures month and the price of another month of the same commodity. 

  • The purchase of a futures contract of one delivery month against the sale of another futures delivery month of the same commodity. 

  • Excessive width of the trails of ink written on overly absorbent paper. 

  • Two facing pages in a book, newspaper etc. 

  • An item in a newspaper or magazine that occupies more than one column or page. 

  • A piece of material used as a cover (such as a bedspread). 

  • Any form of food designed to be spread, such as butters or jams. 

  • The difference between bidding and asking price. 

  • The surface in proportion to the depth of a cut gemstone. 

  • An arbitrage transaction of the same commodity in two markets, executed to take advantage of a profit from price discrepancies. 

  • The act of spreading. 

  • An expanse of land. 

  • Something that has been spread. 

  • A set of multiple torpedoes launched on side-by-side, slowly-diverging paths toward one or more enemy ships. 

  • Food improvised by inmates from various ingredients to relieve the tedium of prison food. 

  • A numerical difference. 

  • The purchase of one delivery month of one commodity against the sale of that same delivery month of a different commodity. 

  • A large meal, especially one laid out on a table. 

  • A layout, pattern or design of cards arranged for a reading. 

  • A large tract of land used to raise livestock; a cattle ranch. 

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