cog vs hostage

cog

noun
  • An unimportant individual in a greater system. 

  • One of the rough pillars of stone or coal left to support the roof of a mine. 

  • A tooth on a gear. 

  • A projection or tenon at the end of a beam designed to fit into a matching opening of another piece of wood to form a joint. 

  • A small fishing boat. 

  • A trick or deception; a falsehood. 

  • A clinker-built, flat-bottomed, square-rigged mediaeval ship of burden, or war with a round, bulky hull and a single mast, typically 15 to 25 meters in length. 

  • A gear; a cogwheel. 

verb
  • To furnish with a cog or cogs. 

  • To seduce, or draw away, by adulation, artifice, or falsehood; to wheedle; to cozen; to cheat. 

  • To cheat; to play or gamble fraudulently. 

  • Of an electric motor or generator, to snap preferentially to certain positions when not energized. 

  • To plagiarize. 

  • To load (a die) so that it can be used to cheat. 

  • To obtrude or thrust in, by falsehood or deception; to palm off. 

hostage

noun
  • One who is compelled by something, especially something that poses a threat; one who is not free to choose their own course of action. 

  • The condition of being held as security or to compel someone else to act or not act in a particular way. 

  • Something that constrains one's actions because it is at risk. 

  • A person seized in order to compel another party to act (or refrain from acting) in a certain way, because of the threat of harm to the hostage. 

  • A person given as a pledge or security for the performance of the conditions of a treaty or similar agreement, such as to ensure the status of a vassal. 

verb
  • To hold (someone or something) hostage, especially in a way that constrains or controls the person or thing held, or in order to exchange for something else. 

  • To give (someone or something) as a hostage to (someone or something else). 

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