inch vs steal

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. 

adj
  • cocky and cheeky 

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. 

steal

verb
  • take, plagiarize, tell on a joke, use a well-worded expression in one's own parlance or writing 

  • To take illegally, or without the owner's permission, something owned by someone else. 

  • To borrow for a short moment. 

  • To dispossess 

  • To convey (something) clandestinely. 

  • To appropriate without giving credit or acknowledgement. 

  • To acquire at a low price. 

  • To withdraw or convey (oneself) clandestinely. 

  • To advance safely to (another base) during the delivery of a pitch, without the aid of a hit, walk, passed ball, wild pitch, or defensive indifference. 

  • To draw attention unexpectedly in (an entertainment), especially by being the outstanding performer. Usually used in the phrase steal the show. 

  • To move silently or secretly. 

  • To get or effect surreptitiously or artfully. 

noun
  • A piece of merchandise available at a very low, attractive price. 

  • A stolen base. 

  • Scoring in an end without the hammer. 

  • A policy in database systems that a database follows which allows a transaction to be written on nonvolatile storage before its commit occurs. 

  • A situation in which a defensive player actively takes possession of the ball or puck from the opponent's team. 

  • The act of stealing. 

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