thwart vs transverse

thwart

adj
  • Placed or situated across something else; cross, oblique, transverse. 

verb
  • To cause to fail; to frustrate, to prevent. 

noun
  • A seat across a boat on which a rower may sit. 

  • An act of thwarting; something which thwarts; a hindrance, an obstacle. 

  • A brace, perpendicular to the keel, that helps maintain the beam (“breadth”) of a marine vessel against external water pressure and that may serve to support the rail. 

transverse

adj
  • Situated or lying across; side to side, relative to some defined "forward" direction; perpendicular or slanted relative to the "forward" direction; identified with movement across areas. 

  • (of an intersection) Not tangent, so that a nondegenerate angle is formed between the two things intersecting. 

  • Made at right angles to the long axis of the body. 

noun
  • Anything that is transverse or athwart. 

  • The longer, or transverse, axis of an ellipse. 

verb
  • To alter or transform. 

  • To lie or run across; to cross. 

  • To overturn. 

  • To traverse or thwart. 

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