captain vs sergeant

captain

verb
  • To act as captain 

  • To exercise command of a ship, aircraft or sports team. 

noun
  • An honorific title given to a prominent person. See colonel. 

  • The head boy of a school. 

  • A maître d', a headwaiter. 

  • A chief or leader. 

  • An army officer with a rank between the most senior grade of lieutenant and major. 

  • A naval officer with a rank between commander and commodore. 

  • The person lawfully in command of a ship or other vessel. 

  • One of the athletes on a sports team who is designated to make decisions, and is allowed to speak for his team with a referee or official. 

  • A commissioned officer in the United States Navy, Coast Guard, NOAA Corps, or PHS Corps of a grade superior to a commander and junior to a rear admiral (lower half). A captain is equal in grade or rank to a United States Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force colonel. 

  • The leader of a group of workers. 

sergeant

noun
  • A fish, the cobia. 

  • A title sometimes given to the servants of the sovereign. 

  • A bailiff. 

  • The highest rank of noncommissioned officer in some non-naval military forces and police. 

  • UK army rank with NATO code OR-6, senior to corporal and junior to warrant officer ranks. 

  • Any of various nymphalid butterflies of the genus Athyma; distinguished from the false sergeants. 

  • A lawyer of the highest rank, equivalent to the doctor of civil law. 

  • A servant in monastic offices. 

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