agony vs distress

agony

noun
  • Extreme pain. 

  • Violent contest or striving. 

  • Paroxysm of joy; keen emotion. 

  • The sufferings of Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. 

  • The last struggle of life; death struggle. 

distress

noun
  • A cause of such discomfort. 

  • The thing taken by distraining; that which is seized to procure satisfaction. 

  • Physical or emotional discomfort, suffering, or alarm, particularly of a more acute nature. 

  • Serious danger. 

  • A seizing of property without legal process to force payment of a debt. 

  • An aversive state of stress to which a person cannot fully adapt. 

verb
  • To treat a new object to give it an appearance of age. 

  • To retain someone’s property against the payment of a debt; to distrain. 

  • To cause strain or anxiety to someone. 

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