affair vs event

affair

noun
  • Any proceeding or action which it is wished to refer to or characterize vaguely. 

  • An action or engagement not of sufficient magnitude to be called a battle. 

  • An adulterous relationship (from affaire de cœur, affair of the heart). 

  • A person with whom someone has an adulterous relationship. 

  • A romantic relationship with someone who is not one's regular partner (boyfriend, girlfriend). 

  • Something which is done or is to be done; business of any kind, commercial, professional, or public. 

  • A party or social gathering, especially of a formal nature. 

  • A material object (vaguely designated). 

event

noun
  • An occurrence; something that happens. 

  • In the event, he turned out to have what I needed anyway. 

  • A point in spacetime having three spatial coordinates and one temporal coordinate. 

  • A possible action that the user can perform that is monitored by an application or the operating system (event listener). When an event occurs an event handler is called which performs a specific task. 

  • One of several contests that combine to make up a competition. 

  • An end result; an outcome (now chiefly in phrases). 

  • A set of some of the possible outcomes; a subset of the sample space. 

  • An episode of severe health conditions. 

  • A prearranged social activity (function, etc.) 

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