humbug vs mountebank

humbug

noun
  • A hoax, jest, or prank. 

  • Nonsense. 

  • A type of hard sweet (candy), usually peppermint flavoured with a striped pattern. 

  • A fight. 

  • A fraud or sham; (uncountable) hypocrisy. 

  • A false arrest on trumped-up charges. 

  • The piglet of the wild boar. 

  • A cheat, fraudster, or hypocrite. 

  • Anything complicated, offensive, troublesome, unpleasant or worrying; a misunderstanding, especially if trivial. 

verb
  • To fight; to act tough. 

  • To play a trick on someone, to cheat, to swindle, to deceive. 

intj
  • Balderdash!, nonsense!, rubbish! 

mountebank

noun
  • Any boastful, false pretender. 

  • One who sells dubious medicines. 

  • One who sells by deception; a con artist. 

verb
  • To act as a mountebank. 

  • To cheat by boasting and false pretenses. 

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