grit vs sand

grit

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

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

  • 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. 

sand

noun
  • 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 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). 

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

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