decline vs stem

decline

verb
  • To turn or bend aside; to deviate; to stray; to withdraw. 

  • To choose not to do something; refuse, forbear, refrain. 

  • To run through from first to last; to recite in order as though declining a noun. 

  • To cause to decrease or diminish. 

  • To bend downward; to bring down; to depress; to cause to bend, or fall. 

  • To move downwards, to fall, to drop. 

  • To inflect for case, number, gender, and the like. 

  • To reject a penalty against the opposing team, usually because the result of accepting it would benefit the non-penalized team less than the preceding play. 

  • To become weaker or worse. 

  • To recite all the different declined forms of (a word). 

noun
  • A weakening. 

  • Downward movement, fall. 

  • A reduction or diminution of activity. 

  • The act of declining or refusing something. 

  • A sloping downward, e.g. of a hill or road. 

stem

verb
  • To direct the stem (of a ship) against; to make headway against. 

  • To ram (clay, etc.) into a blasting hole. 

  • To move the feet apart and point the tips of the skis inward in order to slow down the speed or to facilitate a turn. 

  • To be caused or derived; to originate. 

  • To stop, hinder (for instance, a river or blood). 

  • To descend in a family line. 

  • To remove the stem from. 

noun
  • A lesbian, chiefly African-American, exhibiting both stud and femme traits. 

  • A branch of a family. 

  • A component on a bicycle that connects the handlebars to the bicycle fork. 

  • The penis. 

  • A slender supporting member of an individual part of a plant such as a flower or a leaf; also, by analogy, the shaft of a feather. 

  • A premixed portion of a track for use in audio mastering and remixing. 

  • A person's leg. 

  • The vertical or nearly vertical forward extension of the keel, to which the forward ends of the planks or strakes are attached. 

  • A vertical stroke marking the length of a note in written music. 

  • A narrow part on certain man-made objects, such as a wine glass, a tobacco pipe, a spoon. 

  • A part of an anatomic structure considered without its possible branches or ramifications. 

  • A winder on a clock, watch, or similar mechanism. 

  • The stock of a family; a race or generation of progenitors. 

  • The above-ground stalk (technically axis) of a vascular plant, and certain anatomically similar, below-ground organs such as rhizomes, bulbs, tubers, and corms. 

  • A vertical stroke of a letter. 

  • A crack pipe; or the long, hollow portion of a similar pipe (i.e. meth pipe) resembling a crack pipe. 

  • The main part of an uninflected word to which affixes may be added to form inflections of the word. A stem often has a more fundamental root. Systematic conjugations and declensions derive from their stems. 

  • An advanced or leading position; the lookout. 

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