generation vs gnomon

generation

noun
  • The formation or production of any geometrical magnitude, as a line, a surface, a solid, by the motion, in accordance with a mathematical law, of a point or a magnitude, by the motion of a point, of a surface by a line, a sphere by a semicircle, etc. 

  • Race, family; breed. 

  • A set stage in the development of computing or of a specific technology. 

  • A version of a form of pop culture which differs from later or earlier versions. 

  • The act of creating a living creature or organism; procreation. 

  • The average amount of time needed for children to grow up and have children of their own, generally considered to be a period of around thirty years, used as a measure of time. 

  • The act of creating something or bringing something into being; production, creation. 

  • A single step or stage in the succession of natural descent; a rank or degree in genealogy, the members of a family from the same parents, considered as a single unit. 

  • A group of people born in a specific range of years and whose members can relate culturally to one another. 

  • A copy of a recording made from an earlier copy and thus further degraded in quality. 

gnomon

noun
  • A number representing the increment between two figurate numbers (“numbers equal to the numbers of dots in geometric figures formed of dots”). 

  • A plane figure formed by removing a parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram. 

  • An object such as a pillar or a rod that is used to tell time by the shadow it casts when the sun shines on it, especially the pointer on a sundial. 

  • An object such as a pillar used by an observer to calculate the meridian altitude of the sun (that is, the altitude of the sun when it reaches the observer's meridian), for the purpose of determining the observer's latitude. 

  • The index of the hour circle of a globe. 

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