excavator vs shovel

excavator

noun
  • A person who excavates. 

  • A vehicle, often on tracks, used to dig ditches etc. 

  • A curette used to scrape out pathological material. 

shovel

noun
  • A mechanical part of an excavator with a similar function. 

  • A spade. 

  • A hand tool with a handle, used for moving portions of material such as earth, snow, and grain from one place to another, with some forms also used for digging. Not to be confused with a spade, which is designed solely for small-scale digging and incidental tasks such as chopping of small roots. 

verb
  • To move materials with a shovel. 

  • To move with a shoveling motion. 

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