ball vs boule

ball

verb
  • To form or wind into a ball. 

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

  • 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. 

  • To be hip or cool. 

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leather-covered cushion, fastened to a handle called a ballstock; formerly used by printers for inking the form, then superseded by the roller.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

boule

verb
  • To shape (a piece of dough) into a ball. 

noun
  • A single-crystal ingot produced by synthetic means. 

  • A round loaf of bread. 

  • A round piece of dough. 

  • A through-sawn log with the slices restacked in the order and orientation they originally had in the log, usually with waney edges. 

  • A council of citizens in Ancient Greece 

  • One of the bowls used in the French game of boules. 

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