bullet vs cannonball

bullet

noun
  • A projectile, usually of metal, shot from a gun at high speed. 

  • chess played at an extremely fast time control, with one minute given to each player. (Short for bullet chess.) 

  • A young or little bull; a male calf. 

  • An entire round of unfired ammunition for a firearm, including the projectile, the cartridge casing, the propellant charge, etc. 

  • One year of prison time. 

  • A plumb or sinker. 

  • An ace (the playing card). 

  • A roughly bullet-shaped sweet consisting of a cylinder of liquorice covered in chocolate. 

  • Ammunition for a sling or slingshot which has been manufactured for such use. 

  • A rejection letter, as for employment, admission to a school or a competition. 

  • Very fast (speedy). 

  • Anything that is projected extremely fast. 

  • A notation used on pop music charts to indicate that a song is climbing in the rankings. 

  • A large scheduled repayment of the principal of a loan; a balloon payment. 

  • A printed symbol in the form of a solid circle, “•”, often used to mark items in a list. 

  • The heavy projectile thrown in a game of road bowling. 

verb
  • To make a shot, especially with great speed. 

  • To draw attention to (text) by, or as if by, placing a graphic bullet in front of it. 

  • To speed, like a bullet. 

cannonball

noun
  • A spherical projectile fired from a smoothbore cannon. 

  • The act of jumping (typically into a swimming pool) with the legs bent and the arms wrapped around the knees to create a large splash, mimicking the flight and shape of a cannonball. 

  • An explosive-filled hollow iron sphere fused through a hole and intended to explode at a calculated distance rather than explode on impact. 

  • Something that moves fast, especially a fast train. 

  • A served ball that travels with great speed and describes little or no arc in flight. 

verb
  • To jump or dive into water, performing a cannonball landing. 

  • To career; to move rapidly. 

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