humbug vs nonsense

humbug

noun
  • Nonsense. 

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

  • A hoax, jest, or prank. 

  • 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. 

intj
  • Balderdash!, nonsense!, rubbish! 

verb
  • To fight; to act tough. 

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

nonsense

noun
  • Something foolish. 

  • A type of poetry that contains strange or surreal ideas, as, for example, that written by Edward Lear. 

  • That which is silly, illogical and lacks any meaning, reason or value; that which does not make sense. 

  • Letters or words, in writing or speech, that have no meaning or pattern or seem to have no meaning. 

  • An untrue statement. 

  • A damaged DNA sequence whose products are not biologically active, that is, that does nothing. 

intj
  • An emphatic rejection of something one has just heard and does not believe or agree with. 

verb
  • To make nonsense of; 

  • To attempt to dismiss as nonsense; to ignore or belittle the significance of something; to render unimportant or puny. 

  • To joke around, to waste time 

adj
  • Resulting from the substitution of a nucleotide in a sense codon, causing it to become a stop codon (not coding for an amino-acid). 

  • Nonsensical. 

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