decline vs yield

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. 

yield

verb
  • To give way; to succumb to a force. 

  • To furnish; to afford; to render; to give forth. 

  • To produce as a result. 

  • To give, or give forth, (anything). 

  • To produce a particular sound as the result of a sound law. 

  • To produce as return, as from an investment. 

  • To give as required; to surrender, relinquish or capitulate. 

  • To pass the material's yield point and undergo plastic deformation. 

  • To admit to be true; to concede; to allow. 

  • To give way; to allow another to pass first. 

noun
  • Profit earned from an investment; return on investment. 

  • A product; the quantity of something produced. 

  • The explosive energy value of a bomb, especially a nuke, usually expressed in tons of TNT equivalent. 

  • The current return as a percentage of the price of a stock or bond. 

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