mat vs tile

mat

verb
  • To cover, protect or decorate with mats. 

  • To form a thick, tangled mess; to interweave into, or like, a mat; to entangle. 

noun
  • A floor pad to protect athletes. 

  • A small flat piece of material used to protect a surface from anything hot or rough; a coaster. 

  • A flat piece of coarse material used for wiping one’s feet, or as a decorative or protective floor covering. 

  • A material or component needed for a crafting recipe. 

  • A thickly tangled mess. 

  • An alloy of copper, tin, iron, etc.; white metal. 

  • A thin layer of woven, non-woven, or knitted fiber that serves as reinforcement to a material. 

  • A thin surface layer; superficial cover. 

tile

verb
  • To cover with tiles. 

  • To seal a lodge against intrusions from unauthorised people. 

  • To protect from the intrusion of the uninitiated. 

  • To arrange in a regular pattern, with adjoining edges (applied to tile-like objects, graphics, windows in a computer interface). 

  • To optimize (a loop in program code) by means of the tiling technique. 

noun
  • Any of various flat cuboid playing pieces used in certain games, such as dominoes, Scrabble, or mahjong. 

  • A regularly-shaped slab of clay or other material, affixed to cover or decorate a surface, as in a roof-tile, glazed tile, stove tile, carpet tile, etc. 

  • A rectangular graphic. 

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