fix vs mess

fix

verb
  • To prepare (food or drink). 

  • To focus or determine (oneself, on a concept); to fixate. 

  • To make (a contest, vote, or gamble) unfair; to privilege one contestant or a particular group of contestants, usually before the contest begins; to arrange immunity for defendants by tampering with the justice system via bribery or extortion. 

  • To attach; to affix; to hold in place or at a particular time. 

  • To surgically render an animal, especially a pet, infertile. 

  • To render (a photographic impression) permanent by treating with such applications as will make it insensitive to the action of light. 

  • To become fixed; to settle or remain permanently; to cease from wandering; to rest. 

  • To take revenge on, to best; to serve justice on an assumed miscreant. 

  • To convert into a stable or available form. 

  • To become firm, so as to resist volatilization; to cease to flow or be fluid; to congeal; to become hard and malleable, as a metallic substance. 

  • To prevent enemy pawns from advancing by directly opposing the most advanced one with one of one's own pawns so as to threaten to capture any advancing backward pawns. 

  • To mend, to repair. 

  • To map a (point or subset) to itself. 

noun
  • fettlings (mixture used to line a furnace) 

  • A prearrangement of the outcome of a supposedly competitive process, such as a sporting event, a game, an election, a trial, or a bid. 

  • A repair or corrective action. 

  • A determination of location. 

  • A difficult situation; a quandary or dilemma; a predicament. 

  • A single dose of an addictive drug administered to a drug user. 

mess

verb
  • To eat (with others). 

  • To make soiled by ejaculating. 

  • To screw around with, to bother, to be annoying to. 

  • To supply with a mess. 

  • To belong to a mess. 

  • To make soiled by defecating. 

  • To take meals with a mess. 

  • To throw into disorder or to ruin. 

  • To interfere. 

noun
  • A disagreeable mixture or confusion of things; hence, a situation resulting from blundering or from misunderstanding. 

  • A building or room in which mess is eaten. 

  • A number of persons who eat together, and for whom food is prepared in common, especially military personnel who eat at the same table. 

  • The milk given by a cow at one milking. 

  • A large quantity or number. 

  • Excrement. 

  • A person in a state of (especially emotional) turmoil or disarray; an emotional wreck. 

  • A dessert of fruit and cream, similar to a fool. 

  • A group of iguanas. 

  • A set of four (from the old practice of dividing companies into sets of four at dinner). 

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