grit vs pluck

grit

noun
  • Strength of mind; great courage or fearlessness; fortitude. 

  • A hard, coarse-grained siliceous sandstone; gritstone. Also, a finer sharp-grained sandstone, e.g., grindstone grit. 

  • A collection of hard small materials, such as dirt, ground stone, debris from sandblasting or other such grinding, or swarf from metalworking. 

  • Coarsely ground corn or hominy used as porridge. 

  • Inedible particles in food. 

  • Husked but unground oats. 

  • A measure of the relative coarseness of an abrasive material such as sandpaper, the smaller the number the coarser the abrasive. 

  • Sand or a sand–salt mixture spread on wet and, especially, icy roads and footpaths to improve traction. 

verb
  • To cover with grit. 

  • Apparently only in grit one's teeth: to clench, particularly in reaction to pain or anger. 

pluck

noun
  • Guts, nerve, fortitude or persistence. 

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

  • An instance of plucking or pulling sharply. 

  • 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 grit and pluck occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )