grass vs sward

grass

noun
  • A lawn. 

  • Asparagus; "sparrowgrass". 

  • Marijuana. 

  • Sharp, closely spaced discontinuities in the trace of a cathode-ray tube, produced by random interference. 

  • The season of fresh grass; spring or summer. 

  • An informer, police informer; one who betrays a group (of criminals, etc) to the authorities. 

  • The surface of a mine. 

  • Various plants not in family Poaceae that resemble grasses. 

  • Noise on an A-scope or similar type of radar display. 

  • Any plant of the family Poaceae, characterized by leaves that arise from nodes in the stem and leaf bases that wrap around the stem, especially those grown as ground cover rather than for grain. 

verb
  • To bring to the grass or ground; to land. 

  • To feed with grass. 

  • To act as a grass or informer, to betray; to report on (criminals etc) to the authorities. 

  • To lay out on the grass; to knock down (an opponent etc.). 

  • To cover with grass or with turf. 

  • To expose, as flax, on the grass for bleaching, etc. 

sward

noun
  • An expanse of land covered in grass; a lawn or meadow. 

  • The rind of bacon or pork; also, the outer covering or skin of something. 

  • A homosexual man. 

  • Earth which grass has grown into the upper layer of; greensward, sod, turf; (countable) a portion of such earth. 

verb
  • Of ground, etc.: to be covered with sward; to develop a covering of sward. 

  • To cover (ground, etc.) with sward. 

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