operative vs shadowing

operative

noun
  • A spy, secret agent, or detective. 

  • An employee or other worker with some particular function or skill. 

  • A participant in an operation. 

adj
  • Functional, in working order. 

  • Effectual or important. 

  • Having the power of acting; hence, exerting force, physical or moral; active in the production of effects. 

  • Producing the appropriate or designed effect; efficacious. 

  • Based upon, or consisting of, a surgical operation or operations. 

shadowing

noun
  • Secretly or discreetly tracking or following someone, keeping under surveillance. 

  • The situation where an individual repeats speech immediately as they hear it (usually through earphones). 

  • A faint representation; an adumbration. 

  • The technique of copying ROM contents to RAM to allow for shorter access times. The ROM chip is then disabled while the initialized memory locations are switched in on the same block of addresses. 

  • The effect of being shadowed (in the sense of blocked), as from a light source or radio transmission. 

  • A work experience option where students learn about a job by walking through the work day as a shadow to a competent worker. 

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