modality vs phase

modality

noun
  • Any of the senses (such as sight or taste) 

  • The way in which infrastructure and knowledge of how to use it give rise to a meaningful pattern of interaction (a concept in Anthony Giddens's structuration theory). 

  • The organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations. 

  • The subject concerning certain diatonic scales known as musical modes. 

  • The quality of being limited by a condition. 

  • A particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans, i.e. to the type of sign and to the status of reality ascribed to or claimed by a sign, text or genre. 

  • The classification of propositions on the basis on whether they claim possibility, impossibility, contingency or necessity; mode. 

  • The inflection of a verb that shows how its action is conceived by the speaker; mood 

  • The fact of being modal. 

  • A method of diagnosis or therapy. 

phase

noun
  • That which is exhibited to the eye; the appearance which anything manifests, especially any one among different and varying appearances of the same object. 

  • A component in a material system that is distinguished by chemical composition and/or physical state (solid, liquid or gas) and/or crystal structure. It is delineated from an adjoining phase by an abrupt change in one or more of those conditions. 

  • The arctangent of the quotient formed by dividing the imaginary part of a complex number by the real part. 

  • A distinguishable part of a sequence or cycle occurring over time. 

  • A particular appearance or state in a regularly recurring cycle of changes with respect to quantity of illumination or form, or the absence, of its enlightened disk. Illustrated in Wikipedia's article Lunar phase. 

  • Any one point or portion in a recurring series of changes, as in the changes of motion of one of the particles constituting a wave or vibration; one portion of a series of such changes, in distinction from a contrasted portion, as the portion on one side of a position of equilibrium, in contrast with that on the opposite side. 

  • In certain organisms, one of two or more colour variations characteristic of the species, but independent of the ordinary seasonal and sexual differences, and often also of age. 

  • A haplotype. 

  • The period of play between consecutive breakdowns. 

  • Any appearance or aspect of an object of mental apprehension or view. 

  • In a polyphase electrical power system, one of the power-carrying conductors, or the alternating current carried by it. 

  • A distortion caused by a difference in the speed of propagation for different frequencies 

verb
  • To determine haplotypes in (data) when genotypes are known. 

  • To begin—if construed with "in"—or to discontinue—if construed with out—(doing) something over a period of time (i.e. in phases). 

  • Antique form of faze. 

  • To pass into or through a solid object. 

  • To use a phaser. 

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