cant vs decline

cant

noun
  • Slope, the angle at which something is set. 

  • An outer or external angle. 

  • A blazon of a coat of arms that makes a pun upon the name (or, less often, some attribute or function) of the bearer, canting arms. 

  • A corner (of a building). 

  • A segment forming a side piece in the head of a cask. 

  • Whining speech, such as that used by beggars. 

  • A movement or throw that overturns something. 

  • A parcel, a division. 

  • A private or secret language used by a religious sect, gang, or other group. 

  • A language spoken by some Irish Travellers; Shelta. 

  • An argot, the jargon of a particular class or subgroup. 

  • Empty, hypocritical talk. 

  • An inclination from a horizontal or vertical line; a slope or bevel; a tilt. 

  • A sudden thrust, push, kick, or other impulse, producing a bias or change of direction; also, the bias or turn so given. 

  • A piece of wood laid upon the deck of a vessel to support the bulkheads. 

  • An unfinished log after preliminary cutting. 

  • A segment of the rim of a wooden cogwheel. 

adj
  • Lively, lusty. 

verb
  • To give a sudden turn or new direction to. 

  • To talk, beg, or preach in a singsong or whining fashion, especially in a false or empty manner. 

  • To speak with the jargon of a class or subgroup. 

  • To speak in set phrases. 

  • To set (something) at an angle. 

  • To bevel an edge or corner. 

  • Of a blazon, to make a pun that references the bearer of a coat of arms. 

  • To overturn so that the contents are emptied. 

decline

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

  • A weakening. 

  • Downward movement, fall. 

  • A reduction or diminution of activity. 

  • The act of declining or refusing something. 

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 cant and decline occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )