difference vs variance

difference

noun
  • A disagreement or argument. 

  • The result of a subtraction; sometimes the absolute value of this result. 

  • An addition to a coat of arms to distinguish two people's bearings which would otherwise be the same. See augmentation and cadency. 

  • A characteristic of something that makes it different from something else. 

  • The quality of being different. 

  • The quality or attribute which is added to those of the genus to constitute a species; a differentia. 

  • The set of elements that are in one set but not another ( scriptstyle A◌̅B). 

  • Significant change in or effect on a situation or state. 

  • A Boolean operation which is true when the two input variables are different but is otherwise false; the XOR operation ( scriptstyle A◌̅B+◌̅AB). 

variance

noun
  • The state of differing or being in conflict. 

  • A discrepancy between two legal documents. 

  • A departure from a cause of action originally in a complaint. 

  • An official permit to do something that is ordinarily forbidden by regulations. 

  • The act of varying or the state of being variable. 

  • The number of degrees of freedom in a system. 

  • Covariance and contravariance generally. 

  • A difference between what is expected and what is observed; deviation. 

  • The second central moment in probability. 

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