humbug vs swindle

humbug

noun
  • A fraud or sham; (uncountable) hypocrisy. 

  • Nonsense. 

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

  • A hoax, jest, or prank. 

  • A fight. 

  • 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. 

swindle

noun
  • An instance of swindling. 

  • when a player in a losing position plays a clever move that provokes an error from the opponent, thus achieving a win or a draw 

  • Anything that is deceptively not what it appears to be. 

verb
  • for a player in a losing position to play a clever move that provokes an error from the opponent, thus achieving a win or a draw 

  • To defraud. 

  • To obtain (money or property) by fraudulent or deceitful methods. 

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