descend vs lower

descend

verb
  • To come down to a lower, less fortunate, humbler, less virtuous, or worse, state or rank; to lower or abase oneself 

  • To move toward the south, or to the southward. 

  • To fall in pitch; to pass from a higher to a lower tone. 

  • to proceed by generation or by transmission; to happen by inheritance. 

  • To go down upon or along; to pass from a higher to a lower part of 

  • to be derived (from) 

  • To pass from a higher to a lower place; to move downwards; to come or go down in any way, for example by falling, flowing, walking, climbing etc. 

  • To enter mentally; to retire. 

  • To come down, as from a source, original, or stock 

  • To make an attack, or incursion, as if from a vantage ground; to come suddenly and with violence. 

  • And on the suitors let thy wrath descend. 

  • To pass from the more general or important to the specific or less important matters to be considered. 

lower

verb
  • (lower oneself) To humble oneself; to do something one considers to be beneath one's dignity. 

  • To decrease in value, amount, etc. 

  • To reduce operations to single machine instructions, as part of compilation of a program. 

  • To reduce the degree, intensity, strength, etc., of 

  • To bring down; to humble 

  • To let descend by its own weight, as something suspended; to let down 

  • To reduce the height of 

  • To depress as to direction 

  • to pull down 

  • To reduce (something) in value, amount, etc. 

  • To make less elevated 

  • To fall; to sink; to grow less; to diminish; to decrease 

adj
  • bottom; more towards the bottom than the middle of an object 

  • Situated on lower ground, nearer a coast, or more southerly. 

  • older 

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