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As far as I understand, and are both about choosing a word, or a phrase.
The first could be used when the OP is asking about choosing between two or more words, while the last could be used when the OP is not restricting the possibilities. Still, also the questions using could be understood as questions about choosing a word, where the choice is limited to the full dictionary of English words. For example, Is there any other neutral word for homosexual male than gay? could be interpreted as "What neutral word should I choose to mean an homosexual male?"

Is there any difference between the tags?

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    In my opinion, both of these are bad. Because sooner or later people are going to ask about multiword phrases, then you'll end up with "phrase-request" and "phrase-choice" as well. Then somebody will make requests where they don't care if the answer is a word or a phrase and somebody else will want help choosing between a word on one hand versus a phrase on the other hand (such as search vs look for), at which point you end up with a mess of tags which overlap and still don't cover all the possibilities.
    – hippietrail
    Feb 1, 2013 at 11:02

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I believe the difference should be that question should offer a list of words and ask which one fits given context best, either doesn't suggest any words, or gives one that is obviously a bad fit and asks for better replacements.

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  • I agree, but it might be worth pointing out that ELU uses single-word-requests for the latter category. I don't think it's important if people respond by saying there isn't a commonplace single word, and answer with a phrase.
    – FumbleFingers
    Mar 3, 2013 at 2:38

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