creep vs stride

creep

verb
  • To move slowly with the abdomen close to the ground. 

  • To slip, or to become slightly displaced. 

  • To move or behave with servility or exaggerated humility; to fawn. 

  • To covertly have sex (with a person other than one's primary partner); to cheat with. 

  • To grow across a surface rather than upwards. 

  • To move slowly and quietly in a particular direction. 

  • To have a sensation as of insects creeping on the skin of the body; to crawl. 

  • To make small gradual changes, usually in a particular direction. 

  • To drag in deep water with creepers, as for recovering a submarine cable. 

  • To move in a stealthy or secret manner; to move imperceptibly or clandestinely; to steal in; to insinuate itself or oneself. 

noun
  • The imperceptible downslope movement of surface rock. 

  • Someone unpleasantly strange or eccentric. 

  • A barrier with small openings used to keep large animals out while allowing smaller animals to pass through. 

  • A relatively small gradual change, variation or deviation (from a planned value) in a measure. 

  • A slight displacement of an object; the slight movement of something. 

  • The gradual expansion or proliferation of something beyond its original goals or boundaries, considered negatively. 

  • A frightening and/or disconcerting person, especially one who gives the speaker chills. 

  • The movement of something that creeps (like worms or snails). 

  • An increase in strain with time; the gradual flow or deformation of a material under stress. 

  • In sewn books, the tendency of pages on the inside of a quire to stand out farther than those on the outside of it. 

stride

verb
  • To stand with the legs wide apart; to straddle. 

  • To walk with long steps. 

  • To straddle; to bestride. 

  • To pass over at a step; to step over. 

noun
  • The distance covered by a long step. 

  • A long step in walking. 

  • A jazz piano style of the 1920s and 1930s. The left hand characteristically plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, seventh or tenth interval on the first and third beats, and a chord on the second and fourth beats. 

  • The number of memory locations between successive elements in an array, pixels in a bitmap, etc. 

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