collect vs gather

collect

verb
  • To gather together; amass. 

  • To get; particularly, get from someone. 

  • To infer; to conclude. 

  • To accumulate (a number of similar or related objects), particularly for a hobby or recreation. 

  • To come together in a group or mass. 

  • To collect payments. 

  • To collide with or crash into (another vehicle or obstacle). 

adv
  • With payment due from the recipient. 

noun
  • The prayer said before the reading of the epistle lesson, especially one found in a prayerbook, as with the Book of Common Prayer. 

adj
  • To be paid for by the recipient, as a telephone call or a shipment. 

gather

verb
  • To congregate, or assemble. 

  • To grow gradually larger by accretion. 

  • To bring stitches closer together. 

  • To collect molten glass on the end of a tool. 

  • To accumulate over time, to amass little by little. 

  • To haul in; to take up. 

  • To infer or conclude; to know from a different source. 

  • Especially, to harvest food. 

  • To collect; normally separate things. 

  • To bring parts of a whole closer. 

  • To gain; to win. 

  • To be filled with pus 

  • To add pleats or folds to a piece of cloth, normally to reduce its width. 

  • To bring together, or nearer together, in masonry, as for example where the width of a fireplace is rapidly diminished to the width of the flue. 

noun
  • The soffit or under surface of the masonry required in gathering. See gather (transitive verb). 

  • A gathering. 

  • The inclination forward of the axle journals to keep the wheels from working outward. 

  • A blob of molten glass collected on the end of a blowpipe. 

  • A plait or fold in cloth, made by drawing a thread through it; a pucker. 

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