hair-splitting vs niggling

hair-splitting

noun
  • the act of finding exceedingly small differences which are probably neither important nor noticeable to most people. 

niggling

noun
  • A small irritating sensation. 

adj
  • Petty 

  • Irritating. 

How often have the words hair-splitting and niggling occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )