discharge vs shell

discharge

noun
  • The act of firing a projectile, especially from a firearm. 

  • The volume of water transported by a river in a certain amount of time, usually in units of m³/s (cubic meters per second). 

  • The process of flowing out. 

  • Pus or exudate (other than blood) from a wound or orifice, usually due to infection or pathology. 

  • The act of accomplishing (an obligation) or repaying a debt etc.; performance. 

  • The act of expelling or letting go. 

  • The act of releasing an inpatient from hospital. 

  • The act of releasing an accumulated charge. 

  • The act of releasing a member of the armed forces from service. 

  • The process of unloading something. 

verb
  • To operate (any weapon that fires a projectile, such as a shotgun or sling). 

  • To send away (a creditor) satisfied by payment; to pay one's debt or obligation to. 

  • To relieve of an office or employment; to send away from service; to dismiss. 

  • To release (an accumulated charge). 

  • To release legally from confinement; to set at liberty. 

  • To let fly, as a missile; to shoot. 

  • To free of a debt, claim, obligation, responsibility, accusation, etc.; to absolve; to acquit; to forgive; to clear. 

  • To release (an auxiliary assumption) from the list of assumptions used in arguments, and return to the main argument. 

  • To unload a ship or another means of transport. 

  • To give forth; to emit or send out. 

  • To release (an inpatient) from hospital. 

  • To put forth, or remove, as a charge or burden; to take out, as that with which anything is loaded or filled. 

  • To set aside; to annul; to dismiss. 

  • To bleach out or to remove or efface, as by a chemical process. 

  • To release (a member of the armed forces) from service. 

  • To accomplish or complete, as an obligation. 

  • To expel or let go. 

  • To let fly; to give expression to; to utter. 

shell

noun
  • The cartridge of a breechloading firearm; a load; a bullet; a round. 

  • The outer frame or case of a block within which the sheaves revolve. 

  • A light boat whose frame is covered with thin wood, impermeable fabric, or water-proofed paper; a racing shell or dragon boat. 

  • The exoskeleton or wing covers of certain insects. 

  • A gouge bit or shell bit. 

  • A pod containing the seeds of certain plants, such as the legume Phaseolus vulgaris. 

  • The onset and coda of a syllable. 

  • A string instrument, as a lyre, whose acoustical chamber is formed like a shell. 

  • A psychological barrier to social interaction. 

  • The calcareous or chitinous external covering of mollusks, crustaceans, and some other invertebrates. 

  • An engraved copper roller used in print works. 

  • The covering, or outside part, of a nut. 

  • A set of atomic orbitals that have the same principal quantum number. 

  • An emaciated person. 

  • The body of a drum; the often wooden, often cylindrical acoustic chamber, with or without rims added for tuning and for attaching the drum head. 

  • The accreted mineral formed around a hollow geode. 

  • The overlapping hard plates comprising the armor covering the armadillo's body. 

  • The conjoined scutes that constitute the "shell" (carapace) of a tortoise or turtle. 

  • The casing of a self-contained single-unit artillery projectile. 

  • A garment, usually worn by women, such as a shirt, blouse, or top, with short sleeves or no sleeves, that often fastens in the rear. 

  • One of the outer layers of skin of an onion. 

  • The outward form independent of what is inside. 

  • A legal entity that has no operations. 

  • The empty outward form of someone or something. 

  • An operating system software user interface, whose primary purpose is to launch other programs and control their interactions; the user's command interpreter. Shell is a way to separate the internal complexity of the implementation of the command from the user. The internals can change while the user experience/interface remains the same. 

  • A person's ear. 

  • Husks of cacao seeds, a decoction of which is sometimes used as a substitute or adulterant for cocoa and its products such as chocolate. 

  • The thin coating of copper on an electrotype. 

  • The watertight outer covering of the hull of a vessel, often made with planking or metal plating. 

  • A hollow, usually spherical or cylindrical projectile fired from a siege mortar or a smoothbore cannon. It contains an explosive substance designed to be ignited by a fuse or by percussion at the target site so that it will burst and scatter at high velocity its contents and fragments. Formerly called a bomb. 

  • A concave rough cast-iron tool in which a convex lens is ground to shape. 

  • Any slight hollow structure; a framework, or exterior structure, regarded as not complete or filled in, as the shell of a house. 

  • The hard calcareous covering of a bird egg. 

  • Any mollusk having such a covering. 

  • A coarse or flimsy coffin; a thin interior coffin enclosed within a more substantial one. 

verb
  • To form shallow, irregular cracks (in a coating). 

  • To disburse or give up money, to pay. (Often used with out). 

  • To cast the shell, or exterior covering; to fall out of the pod or husk. 

  • To bombard, to fire projectiles at, especially with artillery. 

  • To remove the outer covering or shell of something. 

  • To fall off, as a shell, crust, etc. 

  • To form a shelling. 

  • To switch to a shell or command line. 

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