parcel vs partition

parcel

verb
  • To divide and distribute by parts or portions; often with out or into. 

  • To wrap a strip around the end of a rope. 

  • To wrap something up into the form of a package. 

  • To add a parcel or item to; to itemize. 

noun
  • An individual item appearing on an invoice or receipt (only in the phrase bill of parcels). 

  • A package wrapped for shipment. 

  • An individual consignment of cargo for shipment, regardless of size and form. 

  • A small amount of food that has been wrapped up, for example a pastry. 

  • A portion of anything taken separately; a fragment of a whole; a part. 

  • A division of land bought and sold as a unit. 

  • An indiscriminate or indefinite number, measure, or quantity; a collection; a group. 

partition

verb
  • To divide something into parts, sections or shares. 

  • To divide a region or country into two or more territories with separate political status. 

  • To separate or divide a room by a partition (ex. a wall), often use with off. 

noun
  • A vertical structure that divides a room. 

  • An approach to division in which one asks what the size of each part is, rather than (as in quotition) how many parts there are. 

  • A musical score. 

  • An action which divides a thing into parts, or separates one thing from another. 

  • A part of something that has been divided. 

  • A part divided off by walls; an apartment; a compartment. 

  • That which divides or separates; that by which different things, or distinct parts of the same thing, are separated; boundary; dividing line or space. 

  • The severance of common or undivided interests, particularly in real estate. It may be effected by consent of parties, or by compulsion of law. 

  • The division of a territory into two or more autonomous ones. 

  • A division of a database or one of its constituting elements such as tables into separate independent parts. 

  • A section of a hard disk separately formatted. 

  • A collection of non-empty, disjoint subsets of a set whose union is the set itself (i.e. all elements of the set are contained in exactly one of the subsets). 

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