high-water mark vs limit

high-water mark

noun
  • The peak or apex of something; the maximum level; the furthest or highest point. 

  • A mark, such as a line of seaweed, showing the highest level reached by a body of water. 

limit

noun
  • The final, utmost, or furthest point; the border or edge. 

  • A restriction; a bound beyond which one may not go. 

  • The cone of a diagram through which any other cone of that same diagram can factor uniquely. 

  • A determining feature; a distinguishing characteristic. 

  • Fixed limit. 

  • The first group of riders to depart in a handicap race. 

  • A person who is exasperating, intolerable, astounding, etc. 

  • A value to which a sequence converges. Equivalently, the common value of the upper limit and the lower limit of a sequence: if the upper and lower limits are different, then the sequence has no limit (i.e., does not converge). 

  • Any of several abstractions of this concept of limit. 

verb
  • To restrict; not to allow to go beyond a certain bound, to set boundaries. 

  • To have a limit in a particular set. 

adj
  • Being a fixed limit game. 

How often have the words high-water mark and limit occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )