fail vs span

fail

verb
  • To be wanting; to fall short; to be or become deficient in any measure or degree up to total absence. 

  • Not to achieve a particular stated goal. (Usage note: The direct object of this word is usually an infinitive.) 

  • To become unable to meet one's engagements; especially, to be unable to pay one's debts or discharge one's business obligation; to become bankrupt or insolvent. 

  • To receive one or more non-passing grades in academic pursuits. 

  • To give a student a non-passing grade in an academic endeavour. 

  • To be wanting to, to be insufficient for, to disappoint, to desert; to disappoint one's expectations. 

  • To neglect. 

  • To be unsuccessful. 

  • Of a machine, etc.: to cease to operate correctly. 

noun
  • A failure, especially of a financial transaction (a termination of an action). 

  • A failure (condition of being unsuccessful). 

  • A failing grade in an academic examination. 

  • Poor quality; substandard workmanship. 

  • A failure (something incapable of success). 

  • A piece of turf cut from grassland. 

adj
  • Unsuccessful; inadequate; unacceptable in some way. 

span

verb
  • To fetter, as a horse; to hobble. 

  • To extend through the distance between or across. 

  • To extend through (a time period). 

  • To measure by the span of the hand with the fingers extended, or with the fingers encompassing the object. 

  • To generate an entire space by means of linear combinations. 

noun
  • The space of all linear combinations of something. 

  • A portion of something by length; a subsequence. 

  • A small space or a brief portion of time. 

  • The spread or extent of an arch or between its abutments, or of a beam, girder, truss, roof, bridge, or the like, between supports. 

  • The time required to execute a parallel algorithm on an infinite number of processors, i.e. the shortest distance across a directed acyclic graph representing the computation steps. 

  • wingspan of a plane or bird 

  • The length of a cable, wire, rope, chain between two consecutive supports. 

  • Any of various traditional units of length approximating this distance, especially the English handspan of 9 inches forming ⅛ fathom and equivalent to 22.86 cm. 

  • A pair of horses or other animals driven together; usually, such a pair of horses when similar in color, form, and action. 

  • A rope having its ends made fast so that a purchase can be hooked to the bight; also, a rope made fast in the center so that both ends can be used. 

  • The full width of an open hand from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger used as an informal unit of length. 

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