principal vs salient

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 

salient

adj
  • Prominent; conspicuous. 

  • Worthy of note; pertinent or relevant. 

  • Projecting outwards, pointing outwards. 

  • Depicted in a leaping posture. 

  • Denoting any angle less than two right angles. 

noun
  • An outwardly projecting part of a fortification, trench system, or line of defense. 

  • 1919, “General Pershing's Story”, in Americans Defending Democracy: Our Soldiers' Own Stories, World's War Stories, Inc., page 9 

  • 1978, Jan Morris, chapter 9, in Farewell the Trumpets, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, page 193 

  • On April 26 the First Division had gone into the line in the Montdidier salient on the Picardy battlefront. 

  • The battlefronts were often no more than a few hundred yards wide, and the salients never more than a few miles deep. 

  • An elongated protrusion of a geopolitical entity, such as a subnational entity or a sovereign state. 

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