gadfly vs limit

gadfly

noun
  • A person or thing that irritates or instigates. 

  • Synonym of gadabout (“a person who restlessly moves from place to place, seeking amusement or the companionship of others”) 

  • Any dipterous (“two-winged”) insect or fly of the family Oestridae (commonly known as a botfly) or Tabanidae (horsefly), noted for irritating animals by buzzing about them, and biting them to suck their blood; a gadbee. 

  • A person who takes without giving back; a bloodsucker. 

  • A person who upsets the status quo by posing novel or upsetting questions, or attempts to stimulate innovation by being an irritant. 

limit

noun
  • A person who is exasperating, intolerable, astounding, etc. 

  • A restriction; a bound beyond which one may not go. 

  • The cone of a diagram through which any other cone of that same diagram can factor uniquely. 

  • A determining feature; a distinguishing characteristic. 

  • Fixed limit. 

  • The final, utmost, or furthest point; the border or edge. 

  • The first group of riders to depart in a handicap race. 

  • A value to which a sequence converges. Equivalently, the common value of the upper limit and the lower limit of a sequence: if the upper and lower limits are different, then the sequence has no limit (i.e., does not converge). 

  • Any of several abstractions of this concept of limit. 

verb
  • To restrict; not to allow to go beyond a certain bound, to set boundaries. 

  • To have a limit in a particular set. 

adj
  • Being a fixed limit game. 

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