mudlark vs urchin

mudlark

noun
  • A child who plays in the mud; a child that spends most of its time in the streets, a street urchin. 

  • A soldier of the Royal Engineers. 

  • Any of various birds that are found in muddy places or build their nests with mud, especially Anthus petrosus and Alauda arvensis. 

  • The Grallina cyanoleuca that builds its nest with mud into a bowl-like shape. 

  • A racehorse that performs well on muddy or wet tracks. 

verb
  • To scavenge in river or harbor mud for items of value. 

urchin

noun
  • A street urchin, a child who lives, or spends most of their time, in the streets. 

  • One of a pair in a series of small card cylinders arranged around a carding drum; so called from its fancied resemblance to the hedgehog. 

  • A sea urchin. 

  • A mischievous child. 

  • A neutron-generating device that triggered the nuclear detonation of the earliest plutonium atomic bombs. 

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