bloodletting vs decimation

bloodletting

noun
  • The archaic practice of treating illness by removing some blood, believed to be tainted, from the stricken person. 

  • The diminishment of any resource with the hope that this will lead to a positive effect. 

  • A circumstance, such as a battle, where a large amount of blood is likely to be spilled through violence. 

decimation

noun
  • The killing or destruction of any large portion of a population. 

  • A digital signal-processing technique for reducing the number of samples in a discrete-time signal; downsampling 

  • The creation of a new sequence comprising only every nth element of a source sequence. 

  • A tithe or the act of tithing. 

  • The killing or punishment of every tenth person, usually by lot. 

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