fugitive vs transient

fugitive

adj
  • Transient, fleeting or ephemeral. 

  • Elusive or difficult to retain. 

  • Fleeing or running away; escaping. 

noun
  • A person who flees or escapes and travels secretly from place to place, and sometimes using disguises and aliases to conceal his/her identity, as to avoid law authorities in order to avoid an arrest or prosecution; or to avoid some other unwanted situation. 

transient

adj
  • Passing or disappearing with time; transitory. 

  • Intermediate. 

  • Occasional; isolated; one-off 

  • having a positive probability of being left and never being visited again. 

  • Decaying with time, especially exponentially. 

  • Operating beyond itself; having an external effect. 

  • Passing through; passing from one person to another. 

  • Remaining for only a brief time. 

noun
  • A relatively loud, non-repeating signal in an audio waveform that occurs very quickly, such as the attack of a snare drum. 

  • A homeless person. 

  • homestay 

  • A transient phenomenon, especially an electric current; a very brief surge. 

  • A module that generally remains in memory only for a short time. 

  • Something that is transient. 

  • A person who passes through a place for a short time; a traveller; a migrant worker. 

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