roper vs sleuth

roper

noun
  • An undercover informer. 

  • One who ropes goods; a packer. 

  • Synonym of outside man (“accomplice who locates a mark to be swindled by a confidence trickster”) 

  • Any of a variety of monsters with tentacles that they use to capture victims. 

  • A person hired by a gambling establishment to locate potential customers and bring them in. 

sleuth

noun
  • A detective. 

  • A group of bears. 

verb
  • To act as a detective; to try to discover who committed a crime, or, more generally, to solve a mystery. 

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