ball vs work

ball

verb
  • To be hip or cool. 

  • To reject from a fraternity or sorority. (Short for blackball.) 

  • To form or wind into a ball. 

  • To gather balls which cling to the feet, as of damp snow or clay; to gather into balls. 

  • To punish by affixing a ball and chain. 

  • To have sexual intercourse with. 

  • To heat in a furnace and form into balls for rolling. 

  • To play basketball. 

intj
  • An appeal by the crowd for holding the ball against a tackled player. This is heard almost any time an opposition player is tackled, without regard to whether the rules about "prior opportunity" to dispose of the ball are fulfilled. 

noun
  • Any sport or game involving a ball; its play, literally or figuratively. 

  • A solid or hollow sphere, or roughly spherical mass. 

  • A competitive event among young African-American and Latin American LGBTQ+ people in which prizes are awarded for drag and similar performances. See ball culture. 

  • Nonsense. 

  • A very enjoyable time. 

  • The set of points in a topological space lying within some open set containing a given point. 

  • An opportunity to launch the pinball into play. 

  • The globe; the earthly sphere. 

  • A pass; a kick of the football towards a teammate. 

  • A pitch that falls outside of the strike zone. 

  • The front of the bottom of the foot, just behind the toes. 

  • Courage. 

  • A large pill, a form in which medicine was given to horses; a bolus. 

  • A formal dance. 

  • The set of points in a metric space of any number of dimensions lying within a given distance (the radius) of a given point. 

  • A single delivery by the bowler, six of which make up an over. 

  • In 3-dimensional Euclidean space, the volume bounded by a sphere. 

  • A leather-covered cushion, fastened to a handle called a ballstock; formerly used by printers for inking the form, then superseded by the roller. 

  • A roundish, protuberant portion of some part of the body. 

  • An object that is the focus of many sports and games, in which it may be thrown, caught, kicked, bounced, rolled, chased, retrieved, hit with an instrument, spun, etc., usually roughly spherical but whose size, weight, bounciness, colour, etc. differ according to the game 

  • A jacketed non-expanding bullet, typically of military origin. 

  • One thousand US dollars. 

  • A quantity of string, thread, etc., wound into a spherical shape. 

work

verb
  • To pull off; to wear, perform, etc. successfully or to advantage. 

  • To embroider with thread. 

  • To cause to ferment. 

  • To function correctly; to act as intended; to achieve the goal designed for. 

  • To shape, form, or improve a material. 

  • Followed by with. General use, said of either fellow employees or instruments or clients. 

  • To cause to happen or to occur as a consequence. 

  • Followed by as. Said of one's job title 

  • To behave in a certain way when handled 

  • To exhaust, by working. 

  • Followed by in (or at, etc.) Said of one's workplace (building), or one's department, or one's trade (sphere of business). 

  • To ferment. 

  • To set into action. 

  • Followed by for. Said of a company or individual who employs. 

  • To use or manipulate to one’s advantage. 

  • To provoke or excite; to influence. 

  • To operate in a certain place, area, or speciality. 

  • To cause to work. 

  • To effect by gradual degrees; 

  • To influence. 

  • To move in an agitated manner. 

  • To cause (someone) to feel (something); to do unto somebody (something, whether good or bad). 

  • To do a specific task by employing physical or mental powers. 

  • To effect by gradual degrees. 

  • To operate in or through; as, to work the phones. 

noun
  • The staging of events to appear as real. 

  • The result of a particular manner of production. 

  • Sustained effort to overcome obstacles and achieve a result. 

  • The equipment needed to inject a drug (syringes, needles, swabs etc.) 

  • Ore before it is dressed. 

  • A measure of energy expended in moving an object; most commonly, force times distance. No work is done if the object does not move. 

  • Something produced using the specified material or tool. 

  • One's employer. 

  • Something on which effort is expended. 

  • effort expended on a particular task. 

  • The place where one is employed. 

  • A fortification. 

  • A measure of energy that is usefully extracted from a process. 

  • A literary, artistic, or intellectual production. 

  • labour, occupation, job. 

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