hireling vs operant

hireling

noun
  • An employee who is hired, often to perform unpleasant tasks with little independence. 

  • Someone who does a job purely for money, rather than out of interest in the work itself. 

  • A horse for hire. 

operant

noun
  • An operative person or thing. 

  • Any of a class of behaviors that produce consequences by operating (i.e., acting) upon the environment. 

adj
  • That operates to produce an effect. 

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