pluck vs sand

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. 

sand

noun
  • "sand in [someone's] eyes" (idiom) 

  • A beach or other expanse of sand. 

  • A moment or interval of time; the term or extent of one's life (referring to the sand in an hourglass). 

  • Rock that is ground more finely than gravel, but is not as fine as silt (more formally, see grain sizes chart), forming beaches and deserts and also used in construction. 

  • A sandpiper. 

  • A particle from 62.5 microns to 2 mm in diameter, following the Wentworth scale. 

  • A light beige colour, like that of typical sand. 

adj
  • Of a light beige colour, like that of typical sand. 

verb
  • To abrade the surface of (something) with sand or sandpaper in order to smooth or clean it. 

  • To blot ink using sand. 

  • To cover with sand. 

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