grind vs pluck

grind

noun
  • The act of reducing to powder, or of sharpening, by friction. 

  • A traditional communal pilot whale hunt in the Faroe Islands. 

  • A specific degree of pulverization of coffee beans. 

  • A tedious and laborious task. 

  • Something that has been reduced to powder, something that has been ground. 

  • A grinding trick on a skateboard or snowboard. 

  • Hustle; hard work. 

verb
  • To instill through repetitive teaching. 

  • To oppress, hold down or weaken. 

  • To produce mechanically and repetitively as if by turning a crank. 

  • To become ground, pulverized, or polished by friction. 

  • To move with much difficulty or friction; to grate. 

  • To remove material by rubbing with an abrasive surface. 

  • To repeat a task a large number of times in a row to achieve a specific goal. 

  • To operate by turning a crank. 

  • To shape with the force of friction. 

  • To rotate the hips erotically. 

  • To reduce to smaller pieces by crushing with lateral motion. 

  • To annoy or irritate (a person); to grind one's gears. 

  • To eat. 

  • To slide the flat portion of a skateboard or snowboard across an obstacle such as a railing. 

  • To dance in a sexually suggestive way with both partners in very close proximity, often pressed against each other. 

  • To work or study hard; to hustle or drudge. 

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 grind and pluck occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )