pair of shears vs scissors

pair of shears

noun
  • shears 

scissors

noun
  • A scissors hold. 

  • A method of skating with one foot significantly in front of the other. 

  • A tool used for cutting thin material, consisting of two crossing blades attached at a pivot point in such a way that the blades slide across each other when the handles are closed. 

  • An instance of the above dogfighting maneuver. 

  • An attacking move conducted by two players; the player without the ball runs from one side of the ball carrier, behind the ball carrier, and receives a pass from the ball carrier on the other side. 

  • A hand with the index and middle fingers open (a handshape resembling scissors), that beats paper and loses to rock. It beats lizard and loses to Spock in rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock. 

  • An exercise in which the legs are switched back and forth, suggesting the motion of scissors. 

  • A type of defensive maneuver in dogfighting, involving repeatedly turning one's aircraft towards that of the attacker in order to force them to overshoot. 

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