sap vs stagger

sap

verb
  • To make unstable or infirm; to unsettle; to weaken. 

  • To subvert by digging or wearing away; to mine; to undermine; to destroy the foundation of. 

  • To proceed by mining, or by secretly undermining; to execute saps. 

  • To gradually weaken. 

  • To strike with a sap (with a blackjack). 

  • To exhaust the vitality of. 

  • To pierce with saps. 

  • To drain, suck or absorb from (tree, etc.). 

noun
  • A narrow ditch or trench made from the foremost parallel toward the glacis or covert way of a besieged place by digging under cover of gabions, etc. 

  • The sapwood, or alburnum, of a tree. 

  • The juice of plants of any kind, especially the ascending and descending juices or circulating fluid essential to nutrition. 

  • Vitality. 

  • A naive person; a simpleton 

  • Any juice. 

  • A short wooden club; a leather-covered hand weapon; a blackjack. 

stagger

verb
  • To cause to doubt and waver; to make to hesitate; to make less steady or confident; to shock. 

  • To cease to stand firm; to begin to give way; to fail. 

  • To begin to doubt and waver in purposes; to become less confident or determined; to hesitate. 

  • To arrange (a series of parts) on each side of a median line alternately, as the spokes of a wheel or the rivets of a boiler seam. 

  • In standing or walking, to sway from one side to the other as if about to fall; to stand or walk unsteadily; to reel or totter. 

  • To arrange similar objects such that each is ahead or above and to one side of the next. 

  • To schedule in intervals or at different times. 

  • To cause to reel or totter. 

noun
  • An unsteady movement of the body in walking or standing as if one were about to fall; a reeling motion. 

  • The spacing out of various actions over time. 

  • One who attends a stag night. 

  • The horizontal positioning of a biplane, triplane, or multiplane's wings in relation to one another. 

  • Bewilderment; perplexity. 

  • The difference in circumference between the left and right tires on a racing vehicle. It is used on oval tracks to make the car turn better in the corners. 

  • A disease of horses and other animals, attended by reeling, unsteady gait or sudden falling. 

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