separate vs tie

separate

verb
  • To divide (a thing) into separate parts. 

  • To disunite from a group or mass; to disconnect. 

  • To cause (things or people) to be separate. 

  • To divide itself into separate pieces or substances. 

noun
  • A printing of an article from a periodical as its own distinct publication and distributed independently, often with different page numbers. 

  • Anything that is sold by itself, especially articles of clothing such as blouses, skirts, jackets, and pants. 

adj
  • Apart from (the rest); not connected to or attached to (anything else). 

  • Not together (with); not united (to). 

tie

verb
  • To unite (musical notes) with a line or slur in the notation. 

  • To have the same score or position as another in a competition or ordering. 

  • To secure (something) by string or the like. 

  • To twist (a string, rope, or the like) around itself securely. 

  • In the Perl programming language, to extend (a variable) so that standard operations performed upon it invoke custom functionality instead. 

  • To attach or fasten (one thing to another) by string or the like. 

  • To have the same score or position as (another) in a competition or ordering. 

  • To form (a knot or the like) in a string or the like. 

noun
  • A twist tie, a piece of wire embedded in paper, strip of plastic with ratchets, or similar object which is wound around something and tightened. 

  • A horizontal wooden or concrete structural member that supports and ties together rails. 

  • A necktie (item of clothing consisting of a strip of cloth tied around the neck). See also bow tie, black tie. 

  • A structural member firmly holding two pieces together. 

  • A tiewig. 

  • The situation in which two or more participants in a competition are placed equally. 

  • A curved line connecting two notes of the same pitch denoting that they should be played as a single note with the combined length of both notes. 

  • A meeting between two players or teams in a competition. 

  • The situation at the end of all innings of a match where both sides have the same total of runs (different from a draw). 

  • A knot of hair, as at the back of a wig. 

  • A knot; a fastening. 

  • A lace-up shoe. 

  • A connection between two vertices. 

  • One or more equal values or sets of equal values in the data set. 

  • A curved line connecting two letters (⁀), used in the IPA to denote a coarticulation, as for example /d͡ʒ/. 

  • A strong connection between people or groups of people. 

  • A bearing and distance between a lot corner or point and a benchmark or iron off site. 

  • An equalizer, a run, goal, point, etc which causes participants in a competition to be placed equally or have the same score(s). 

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