fox vs inch

fox

verb
  • To act slyly or craftily. 

  • To trick, fool or outwit (someone) by cunning or ingenuity. 

  • To make sour, as beer, by causing it to ferment. 

  • To confuse or baffle (someone). 

  • To intoxicate; to stupefy with drink. 

  • To turn sour; said of beer, etc., when it sours in fermenting. 

  • To discolour paper. Fox marks are spots on paper caused by humidity. (See foxing.) 

  • To repair (boots) with new front upper leather, or to piece the upper fronts of. 

noun
  • A wedge driven into the split end of a bolt to tighten it. 

  • A physically attractive man or woman. 

  • A fox terrier. 

  • Air-to-air weapon launched. 

  • A red fox, small carnivore (Vulpes vulpes), related to dogs and wolves, with red or silver fur and a bushy tail. 

  • A small strand of rope made by twisting several rope-yarns together. Used for seizings, mats, sennits, and gaskets. 

  • A cunning person. 

  • A person with reddish brown hair, usually a woman. 

  • A hidden radio transmitter, finding which is the goal of radiosport. 

  • The fourteenth Lenormand card. 

  • The fur of a fox. 

  • The gemmeous dragonet, a fish, Callionymus lyra, so called from its yellow color. 

  • Any of numerous species of small wild canids resembling the red fox. In the taxonomy they form the tribe Vulpini within the family Canidae, consisting of nine genera (see the Wikipedia article on the fox). 

inch

verb
  • to humiliate; to provoke; to speak in a cocky and cheeky manner 

  • To drive by inches, or small degrees. 

  • To advance very slowly, or by a small amount (in a particular direction). 

  • To deal out by inches; to give sparingly. 

noun
  • A depth of one inch on the ground, used as a measurement of rainfall. 

  • A small island; an islet. 

  • A meadow, pasture, field, or haugh. 

  • Any very short distance. 

  • A depth of one inch in a glass, used as a rough measurement of alcoholic beverages. 

  • An English unit of length equal to 1/12 of a foot or 2.54 cm, roughly the width of a thumb. 

  • Any of various similar units of length in other traditional systems of measurement. 

adj
  • cocky and cheeky 

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