clinker vs damp squib

clinker

noun
  • A mass of bricks fused together by intense heat. 

  • Someone or something that clinks. 

  • A scum of oxide of iron formed in forging. 

  • Slag or ash produced by intense heat in a furnace, kiln or boiler that forms a hard residue upon cooling. 

  • A very hard brick used for paving customarily made in the Netherlands. 

  • An intermediate product in the manufacture of Portland cement, obtained by sintering limestone and alumino-silicate materials such as clay into nodules in a cement kiln. 

  • Hardened volcanic lava. 

  • A style of boatbuilding using overlapping planks. 

  • fetters. 

verb
  • To convert or be converted into clinker. 

damp squib

noun
  • A firework that has been wet and therefore fails to go off correctly. 

  • Anything that doesn’t work properly, or fails to come up to expectations; a dud. 

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