decline vs devolution

decline

noun
  • Downward movement, fall. 

  • A weakening. 

  • A reduction or diminution of activity. 

  • The act of declining or refusing something. 

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

verb
  • 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 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). 

devolution

noun
  • A rolling down. 

  • A descent, especially one that passes through a series of revolutions, or by succession 

  • Degeneration (as opposed to evolution). 

  • The transfer of some powers and the delegation of some functions from a central government to local government (e.g. from the U.K. parliament to Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly). 

  • The transference of a right to a successor, or of a power from one body to another. 

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