gouge vs pluck

gouge

noun
  • An act of gouging. 

  • Soft material lying between the wall of a vein and the solid vein of ore. 

  • A bookbinder's tool with a curved face, used for blind tooling or gilding. 

  • An incising tool that cuts blanks or forms for envelopes, gloves, etc., from leather, paper, or other materials. 

  • An impostor. 

  • Information. 

  • A cut or groove, as left by a gouge or something sharp. 

  • A chisel with a curved blade for cutting or scooping channels, grooves, or holes in wood, stone, etc. 

  • A cheat, a fraud; an imposition. 

verb
  • To make a groove, hole, or mark in by scooping with or as if with a gouge. 

  • To cheat or impose upon; in particular, to charge an unfairly or unreasonably high price. 

  • To use a gouge. 

  • To dig or scoop (something) out with or as if with a gouge; in particular, to use a thumb to push or try to push the eye (of a person) out of its socket. 

pluck

noun
  • An instance of plucking or pulling sharply. 

  • Guts, nerve, fortitude or persistence. 

  • The lungs, heart with trachea and often oesophagus removed from slaughtered animals. 

  • Cheap wine. 

verb
  • To take or remove (someone) quickly from a particular place or situation. 

  • To pull something sharply; to pull something out 

  • To pull or twitch sharply. 

  • To remove feathers from a bird. 

  • To play a string instrument pizzicato. 

  • To gently play a single string, e.g. on a guitar, violin etc. 

  • Of a glacier: to transport individual pieces of bedrock by means of gradual erosion through freezing and thawing. 

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