beat a dead horse vs spell out

beat a dead horse

verb
  • To persist or continue far beyond any purpose, interest or reason. 

spell out

verb
  • To form (a word) from letters; say the letters in a word. 

  • To explain in clear and simple terms; to be explicit. 

  • To replace an acronym with its expansion. 

How often have the words beat a dead horse and spell out occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )