pass by vs tick away

pass by

verb
  • Of a period of time: to come to an end, to elapse. 

  • to drop by 

  • To travel past without stopping. 

  • To travel past (something) without stopping; to ignore, to disregard. 

tick away

verb
  • To count down to zero (i.e. signaling the end (or start) of something). 

How often have the words pass by and tick away occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )