grade vs pluck

grade

noun
  • A harsh scraping or cutting; a grating. 

  • A slope (up or down) of a roadway or other passage 

  • Performance on a test or other evaluation(s), expressed by a number, letter, or other symbol; a score. 

  • An area that has been flattened by a grader (construction machine). 

  • In a linear system of divisors on an n-dimensional variety, the number of free intersection points of n generic divisors. 

  • A rating. 

  • A taxon united by a level of morphological or physiological complexity that is not a clade. 

  • A degree or level of something; a position within a scale; a degree of quality. 

  • A level of primary and secondary education. 

  • A gradian. 

  • An eyeglass prescription. 

  • The degree of malignity of a tumor expressed on a scale. 

  • Degree (any of the three stages (positive, comparative, superlative) in the comparison of an adjective or an adverb). 

  • The level of the ground. 

  • A student of a particular grade (used with the grade level). 

verb
  • To describe, modify or inflect so as to classify as to degree. 

  • To pass imperceptibly from one grade into another. 

  • To pass from one school grade into the next. 

  • To assign scores to the components of an academic test, or to overall academic performance. 

  • To flatten, level, or smooth a large surface, especially with a grader. 

  • To remove or trim part of a seam allowance from a finished seam so as to reduce bulk and make the finished piece more even when turned right side out. 

  • To apply classifying labels to data (typically by a manual rather than automatic process). 

  • To organize in grades. 

pluck

noun
  • An instance of plucking or pulling sharply. 

  • Guts, nerve, fortitude or persistence. 

  • The lungs, heart with trachea and often oesophagus removed from slaughtered animals. 

  • Cheap wine. 

verb
  • To take or remove (someone) quickly from a particular place or situation. 

  • To pull something sharply; to pull something out 

  • To pull or twitch sharply. 

  • To remove feathers from a bird. 

  • To play a string instrument pizzicato. 

  • To gently play a single string, e.g. on a guitar, violin etc. 

  • Of a glacier: to transport individual pieces of bedrock by means of gradual erosion through freezing and thawing. 

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