decline vs stray

decline

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

  • 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 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). 

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. 

stray

verb
  • To wander, as from a direct course; to deviate, or go out of the way. 

  • To wander from company or outside proper limits; to rove or roam at large; to go astray. 

  • To wander from the path of duty or rectitude; to err. 

  • To cause to stray; lead astray. 

noun
  • An area of common land for use by domestic animals generally. 

  • Any domestic animal that has no enclosure nor proper place and company, but that instead wanders at large or is lost; an estray. 

  • An instance of atmospheric interference. 

  • One who is lost, literally or figuratively. 

  • An act of wandering off or going astray. 

adj
  • Having gone astray; strayed; wandering 

  • In the wrong place; misplaced. 

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