peak vs principal

peak

adj
  • At the greatest extent; maximum. 

  • bad or unfortunate. 

  • Unlucky; unfortunate 

  • Maximal, quintessential, archetypical; representing the culmination of its type. 

  • Bad 

verb
  • To reach a highest degree or maximum. 

  • To pry; to peep slyly. 

  • To rise or extend into a peak or point; to form, or appear as, a peak. 

  • To raise the point of (a gaff) closer to perpendicular. 

  • To cause to adopt gender-critical or trans-exclusionary views (ellipsis of peak trans). 

  • To acquire sharpness of figure or features; hence, to look thin or sickly. 

  • To become sick or wan. 

noun
  • The highest value reached by some quantity in a time period. 

  • The upper aftermost corner of a fore-and-aft sail. 

  • A point; the sharp end or top of anything that terminates in a point; as, the peak, or front, of a cap. 

  • The top, or one of the tops, of a hill, mountain, or range, ending in a point. 

  • The extremity of an anchor fluke; the bill. 

  • The whole hill or mountain, especially when isolated. 

  • The narrow part of a vessel's bow, or the hold within it. 

  • A local maximum of a function, e.g. for sine waves, each point at which the value of y is at its maximum. 

principal

adj
  • Primary; most important; first level in importance. 

  • Chosen or assumed among a branch of possible values of a multi-valued function so that the function is single-valued. 

noun
  • The chief administrator of a school. 

  • A diapason, a type of organ stop on a pipe organ. 

  • The construction that gives shape and strength to a roof, generally a truss of timber or iron; or, loosely, the most important member of a piece of framing. 

  • A dancer at the highest rank within a professional dance company, particularly a ballet company. 

  • The primary participant in a crime. 

  • The first two long feathers of a hawk's wing. 

  • A security principal. 

  • A legal person that authorizes another (the agent) to act on their behalf; or on whose behalf an agent or gestor in a negotiorum gestio acts. 

  • The chief executive and chief academic officer of a university or college. 

  • The money originally invested or loaned, on which basis interest and returns are calculated. 

  • A partner or owner of a business. 

  • One of the turrets or pinnacles of waxwork and tapers with which the posts and centre of a funeral hearse were formerly crowned 

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