background vs locale

background

noun
  • A part of the picture that depicts scenery to the rear or behind the main subject; context. 

  • One's social heritage, or previous life; what one did in the past. 

  • Information relevant to the current situation about past events; history. 

  • The image or color over which a computer's desktop items are shown (e.g. icons or application windows). 

  • A less important feature of scenery (as opposed to foreground). 

  • A type of activity on a computer that is not normally visible to the user. 

verb
  • To put in a position that is not prominent. 

  • To gather and provide background information (on). 

adj
  • Less important or less noticeable in a scene or system. 

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 background and locale occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )