cricket vs picket

cricket

noun
  • A signalling device used by soldiers in hostile territory to identify themselves to a friendly in low visibility conditions. 

  • A relatively small area of a roof constructed to divert water from a horizontal intersection of the roof with a chimney, wall, expansion joint, or other projection. 

  • A variant of the game of darts. See Cricket (darts). 

  • An aural warning sound consisting of a continuously-repeating chime, designed to be difficult for pilots to ignore. 

  • A wooden footstool. 

  • An insect in the order Orthoptera, especially family Gryllidae, that makes a chirping sound by rubbing its wing casings against combs on its hind legs. 

  • A game played outdoors with bats and a ball between two teams of eleven, popular in England and many Commonwealth countries. 

  • An act that is fair and sportsmanlike. 

  • In the form crickets: absolute silence; no communication. 

verb
  • To play the game of cricket. 

picket

noun
  • One of the soldiers or troops placed on a line forward of a position to warn against an enemy advance; or any unit (for example, an aircraft or ship) performing a similar function. 

  • A type of punishment by which an offender had to rest his or her entire body weight on the top of a small stake. 

  • A protester positioned outside an office, workplace etc. during a strike (usually in plural); also the protest itself. 

  • The card game piquet. 

  • A stake driven into the ground. 

  • A tool in mountaineering that is driven into the snow and used as an anchor or to arrest falls. 

  • A sentry. 

verb
  • To enclose or fortify with pickets or pointed stakes. 

  • To tether to, or as if to, a picket. 

  • To guard, as a camp or road, by an outlying picket. 

  • To protest, organized by a labour union, typically in front of the location of employment. 

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