bullet vs shell

bullet

noun
  • An entire round of unfired ammunition for a firearm, including the projectile, the cartridge casing, the propellant charge, etc. 

  • chess played at an extremely fast time control, with one minute given to each player. (Short for bullet chess.) 

  • A young or little bull; a male calf. 

  • One year of prison time. 

  • A plumb or sinker. 

  • An ace (the playing card). 

  • A roughly bullet-shaped sweet consisting of a cylinder of liquorice covered in chocolate. 

  • A projectile, usually of metal, shot from a gun at high speed. 

  • Ammunition for a sling or slingshot which has been manufactured for such use. 

  • A rejection letter, as for employment, admission to a school or a competition. 

  • Very fast (speedy). 

  • Anything that is projected extremely fast. 

  • A notation used on pop music charts to indicate that a song is climbing in the rankings. 

  • A large scheduled repayment of the principal of a loan; a balloon payment. 

  • A printed symbol in the form of a solid circle, “•”, often used to mark items in a list. 

  • The heavy projectile thrown in a game of road bowling. 

verb
  • To make a shot, especially with great speed. 

  • To draw attention to (text) by, or as if by, placing a graphic bullet in front of it. 

  • To speed, like a bullet. 

shell

noun
  • The cartridge of a breechloading firearm; a load; a bullet; a round. 

  • The outer frame or case of a block within which the sheaves revolve. 

  • A light boat whose frame is covered with thin wood, impermeable fabric, or water-proofed paper; a racing shell or dragon boat. 

  • The exoskeleton or wing covers of certain insects. 

  • A gouge bit or shell bit. 

  • A pod containing the seeds of certain plants, such as the legume Phaseolus vulgaris. 

  • The onset and coda of a syllable. 

  • A string instrument, as a lyre, whose acoustical chamber is formed like a shell. 

  • A psychological barrier to social interaction. 

  • The calcareous or chitinous external covering of mollusks, crustaceans, and some other invertebrates. 

  • An engraved copper roller used in print works. 

  • The covering, or outside part, of a nut. 

  • A set of atomic orbitals that have the same principal quantum number. 

  • An emaciated person. 

  • The body of a drum; the often wooden, often cylindrical acoustic chamber, with or without rims added for tuning and for attaching the drum head. 

  • The accreted mineral formed around a hollow geode. 

  • The overlapping hard plates comprising the armor covering the armadillo's body. 

  • The conjoined scutes that constitute the "shell" (carapace) of a tortoise or turtle. 

  • The casing of a self-contained single-unit artillery projectile. 

  • A garment, usually worn by women, such as a shirt, blouse, or top, with short sleeves or no sleeves, that often fastens in the rear. 

  • One of the outer layers of skin of an onion. 

  • The outward form independent of what is inside. 

  • A legal entity that has no operations. 

  • The empty outward form of someone or something. 

  • An operating system software user interface, whose primary purpose is to launch other programs and control their interactions; the user's command interpreter. Shell is a way to separate the internal complexity of the implementation of the command from the user. The internals can change while the user experience/interface remains the same. 

  • A person's ear. 

  • Husks of cacao seeds, a decoction of which is sometimes used as a substitute or adulterant for cocoa and its products such as chocolate. 

  • The thin coating of copper on an electrotype. 

  • The watertight outer covering of the hull of a vessel, often made with planking or metal plating. 

  • A hollow, usually spherical or cylindrical projectile fired from a siege mortar or a smoothbore cannon. It contains an explosive substance designed to be ignited by a fuse or by percussion at the target site so that it will burst and scatter at high velocity its contents and fragments. Formerly called a bomb. 

  • A concave rough cast-iron tool in which a convex lens is ground to shape. 

  • Any slight hollow structure; a framework, or exterior structure, regarded as not complete or filled in, as the shell of a house. 

  • The hard calcareous covering of a bird egg. 

  • Any mollusk having such a covering. 

  • A coarse or flimsy coffin; a thin interior coffin enclosed within a more substantial one. 

verb
  • To form shallow, irregular cracks (in a coating). 

  • To disburse or give up money, to pay. (Often used with out). 

  • To cast the shell, or exterior covering; to fall out of the pod or husk. 

  • To bombard, to fire projectiles at, especially with artillery. 

  • To remove the outer covering or shell of something. 

  • To fall off, as a shell, crust, etc. 

  • To form a shelling. 

  • To switch to a shell or command line. 

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