courtyard vs yard

courtyard

noun
  • An area, open to the sky, partially or wholly surrounded by walls or buildings. 

yard

noun
  • A small, usually uncultivated area adjoining or (now especially) within the precincts of a house or other building. 

  • 10⁹, A short scale billion; a long scale thousand millions or milliard. 

  • A long tapered timber hung on a mast to which is bent a sail, and may be further qualified as a square, lateen, or lug yard. The first is hung at right angles to the mast, the latter two hang obliquely. 

  • 100 dollars. 

  • A place where moose or deer herd together in winter for pasture, protection, etc. 

  • Any spar carried aloft. 

  • Units of similar composition or length in other systems. 

  • One’s house or home. 

  • The property surrounding one's house, typically dominated by one's lawn. 

  • An enclosed area designated for a specific purpose, e.g. on farms, railways etc. 

  • A unit of length equal to 3 feet in the US customary and British imperial systems of measurement, equal to precisely 0.9144 m since 1959 (US) or 1963 (UK). 

verb
  • To move a yard at a time, as opposed to inching along. 

  • To confine to a yard. 

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