decline vs fold

decline

verb
  • To move downwards, to fall, to drop. 

  • 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 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). 

noun
  • A weakening. 

  • Downward movement, fall. 

  • A reduction or diminution of activity. 

  • The act of declining or refusing something. 

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

fold

verb
  • To fall over; to be crushed. 

  • To stir gently, with a folding action. 

  • To make the proper arrangement (in a thin material) by bending. 

  • To give way on a point or in an argument. 

  • To enclose within folded arms (see also enfold). 

  • To become folded; to form folds. 

  • To withdraw from betting. 

  • To withdraw or quit in general. 

  • To double or lay together, as the arms or the hands. 

  • To cover or wrap up; to conceal. 

  • To bend (any thin material, such as paper) over so that it comes in contact with itself. 

  • To confine animals in a fold. 

  • Of a company, to cease to trade. 

noun
  • A group of sheep or goats. 

  • A section of source code that can be collapsed out of view in an editor to aid readability. 

  • Home, family. 

  • A church congregation, a group of people who adhere to a common faith and habitually attend a given church; the Christian church as a whole, the flock of Christ. 

  • An act of folding. 

  • That which is folded together, or which enfolds or envelops; embrace. 

  • The division between the part of a web page visible in a web browser window without scrolling; usually the fold. 

  • A bend or crease. 

  • Any correct move in origami. 

  • A pen or enclosure for sheep or other domestic animals. 

  • The division between the top and bottom halves of a broadsheet: headlines above the fold will be readable in a newsstand display; usually the fold. 

  • In functional programming, any of a family of higher-order functions that process a data structure recursively to build up a value. 

  • A group of people with shared ideas or goals or who live or work together. 

  • The bending or curving of one or a stack of originally flat and planar surfaces, such as sedimentary strata, as a result of plastic (i.e. permanent) deformation. 

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