passage vs staircase

passage

noun
  • A strait or other narrow waterway. 

  • An incident or episode. 

  • A gambling game for two players using three dice, in which the object is to throw a double over ten. 

  • A movement in classical dressage, in which the horse performs a very collected, energetic, and elevated trot that has a longer period of suspension between each foot fall than a working trot. 

  • A fee paid for passing or for being conveyed between places. 

  • The act of passing; movement across or through. 

  • Part of a path or journey. 

  • A paragraph or section of text or music with particular meaning. 

  • A passageway or corridor. 

  • The right to pass from one place to another. 

  • Serial passage. 

  • The official approval of a bill or act by a parliament. 

  • The advance of time. 

  • The vagina. 

  • The use of tight brushwork to link objects in separate spatial plains. Commonly seen in Cubist works. 

  • An underground cavity, formed by water or falling rocks, which is much longer than it is wide. 

adj
  • Of a bird: Less than a year old but living on its own, having left the nest. 

verb
  • To execute a passage movement. 

  • To pass something, such as a pathogen or stem cell, through a host or medium. 

  • To make a passage, especially by sea; to cross. 

staircase

noun
  • A set of locks (enclosed sections of waterway) mounted one above the next. 

  • A flight of stairs; a stairway. 

  • A connected set of flights of stairs; a stairwell. 

verb
  • To modify (a signal, a graph, etc.) to reduce a smooth curve to a series of discrete steps. 

  • To increase one's share in a co-ownership. 

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