distress vs stress

distress

verb
  • To cause strain or anxiety to someone. 

  • 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. 

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. 

stress

verb
  • To suffer stress; to worry or be agitated. 

  • To apply force to (a body or structure) causing strain. 

  • To emphasise (words in speaking). 

  • To emphasise (a point) in an argument or discussion. 

  • To emphasise (a syllable of a word). 

  • To apply emotional pressure to (a person or animal). 

noun
  • Emphasis placed on a particular point in an argument or discussion (whether spoken or written). 

  • A suprasegmental feature of a language having additional attention raised to a sound, word or word group by means of of loudness, duration or pitch; phonological prominence. 

  • distress; the act of distraining; also, the thing distrained. 

  • Aggression toward an organism resulting in a response in an attempt to restore previous conditions. 

  • Emotional pressure suffered by a human being or other animal. 

  • A physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism. 

  • The internal distribution of force across a small boundary per unit area of that boundary (pressure) within a body. It causes strain or deformation and is typically symbolised by σ or τ. 

  • Force externally applied to a body which cause internal stress within the body. 

  • The suprasegmental feature of a language having additional attention raised to a sound by means of of loudness and/or duration; phonological prominence phonetically achieved by means of dynamics as distinct from pitch. 

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