decline vs swerve

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. 

swerve

verb
  • To turn aside or deviate to avoid impact. 

  • To bend; to incline; to give way. 

  • To go out of a straight line; to deflect. 

  • To wander from any line prescribed, or from a rule or duty; to depart from what is established by law, duty, custom, or the like; to deviate. 

  • Of a projectile, to travel in a curved line 

  • To climb or move upward by winding or turning. 

  • To go out of one's way to avoid; to snub. 

  • To drive in the trajectory of another vehicle to stop it, to cut off. 

noun
  • A sudden movement out of a straight line, for example to avoid a collision. 

  • A deviation from duty or custom. 

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