lengthen vs lessen

lengthen

verb
  • To become longer. 

  • To make longer, to extend the length of. 

lessen

verb
  • To become less. 

  • To make less; to diminish; to reduce. 

conj
  • unless. 

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