phony vs pretender

phony

noun
  • A person who professes beliefs or opinions that they do not hold. 

  • Anything fraudulent or fake. 

  • A person who assumes an identity or quality other than their own. 

verb
  • To fake. 

adj
  • Fraudulent; fake; having a misleading appearance. 

pretender

noun
  • A person who professes beliefs and opinions that they do not hold. 

  • A claimant to a throne or the office of a ruler; orig. in a neutral sense, but now always applied to a claimant who is held to have no just title. 

  • One who puts forth a claim, or who aspires to or aims at something; a claimant, candidate, or aspirant; now, one who makes baseless pretensions. 

  • A claimant to an abolished or already occupied throne. 

  • One who pretends or lays claim to something; one who makes a profession, show, or assertion, esp. without adequate grounds, falsely, or with intent to deceive; a dissembler, deceiver, charlatan, hypocrite. 

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