dare vs decline

dare

noun
  • Defiance; challenge. 

  • The quality of daring; venturesomeness; boldness. 

  • A challenge to prove courage. 

  • In the game truth or dare, the choice to perform a dare set by the other players. 

  • A small fish, the dace 

verb
  • To terrify; to daunt. 

  • To have enough courage (to do something). 

  • To have enough courage to meet or do something, go somewhere, etc.; to face up to 

  • To catch (larks) by producing terror through the use of mirrors, scarlet cloth, a hawk, etc., so that they lie still till a net is thrown over them. 

  • To defy or challenge (someone to do something) 

decline

noun
  • The act of declining or refusing something. 

  • A weakening. 

  • Downward movement, fall. 

  • A reduction or diminution of activity. 

  • A sloping downward, e.g. of a hill or road. 

verb
  • To choose not to do something; refuse, forbear, refrain. 

  • To run through from first to last; to recite in order as though declining a noun. 

  • To cause to decrease or diminish. 

  • To bend downward; to bring down; to depress; to cause to bend, or fall. 

  • To turn or bend aside; to deviate; to stray; to withdraw. 

  • To move downwards, to fall, to drop. 

  • To inflect for case, number, gender, and the like. 

  • To reject a penalty against the opposing team, usually because the result of accepting it would benefit the non-penalized team less than the preceding play. 

  • To become weaker or worse. 

  • To recite all the different declined forms of (a word). 

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