area vs locale

area

noun
  • A particular geographic region. 

  • Any particular extent of surface, especially an empty or unused extent. 

  • An open space, below ground level, giving access to the basement of a house, and typically separated from the pavement by railings. 

  • The extent, scope, or range of an object or concept. 

  • Genitals. 

  • A measure of the extent of a surface; it is measured in square units. 

  • Penalty box; penalty area. 

locale

noun
  • The place where something happens. 

  • The set of settings related to the language and region in which a computer program executes. Examples are language, currency and time formats, character encoding etc. 

  • A partially ordered set with the following additional axiomatic properties: any finite subset of it has a meet, any arbitrary subset of it has a join, and distributivity, which states that a binary meet distributes with respect to an arbitrary join. (Note: locales are just like frames except that the category of locales is opposite to the category of frames.) 

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