corruption vs decay

corruption

noun
  • The decomposition of biological matter. 

  • The act of corrupting or making putrid, or state of being corrupt or putrid; decomposition or disorganization, in the process of putrefaction; putrefaction; deterioration. 

  • The product of corruption; putrid matter. 

  • Unethical administrative or executive practices (in government or business), including bribery (offering or receiving bribes), conflicts of interest, nepotism, and so on. 

  • The act of changing, or of being changed, for the worse; departure from what is pure, simple, or correct. 

  • The destruction of data by manipulation of parts of it, either by deliberate or accidental human action or by imperfections in storage or transmission media. 

  • A nonstandard form of a word, expression, or text, assigned a value judgment as being debased, especially when resulting from misunderstanding, transcription error, or mishearing. 

  • The act of corrupting or of impairing integrity, virtue, or moral principle; the state of being corrupted or debased; loss of purity or integrity 

  • Something originally good or pure that has turned evil or impure; a perversion. 

decay

noun
  • The process or result of being gradually decomposed. 

  • A deterioration of condition; loss of status or fortune. 

  • The situation, in programming languages such as C, where an array loses its type and dimensions and is reduced to a pointer, for example by passing it to a function. 

verb
  • To undergo bit rot, that is, gradual degradation. 

  • To deteriorate, to get worse, to lose strength or health, to decline in quality. 

  • To undergo optical decay, that is, to relax to a less excited state, usually by emitting a photon or phonon. 

  • Loss of airspeed due to drag. 

  • To undergo software rot, that is, to fail to be updated in a changing environment, so as to eventually become legacy or obsolete. 

  • To change by undergoing fission, by emitting radiation, or by capturing or losing one or more electrons; to undergo radioactive decay. 

  • To cause to rot or deteriorate. 

  • Of an array: to lose its type and dimensions and be reduced to a pointer, for example when passed to a function. 

  • To rot, to go bad. 

  • To undergo prolonged reduction in altitude (above the orbited body). 

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