cram vs shoehorn

cram

verb
  • To press, force, or drive, particularly in filling, or in thrusting one thing into another; to stuff; to fill to superfluity. 

  • To fill with food to satiety; to stuff. 

  • To study hard; to swot. 

  • To eat greedily, and to satiety; to stuff oneself. 

  • To put hastily through an extensive course of memorizing or study, as in preparation for an examination. 

noun
  • A warp having more than two threads passing through each dent or split of the reed. 

  • Information hastily memorized. 

  • A small friendship book with limited space for people to enter their information. 

  • The act of cramming (forcing or stuffing something). 

  • A mathematical board game in which players take turns placing dominoes horizontally or vertically until no more can be placed, the loser being the player who cannot continue. 

shoehorn

verb
  • To force (something) into (a tight space); to squeeze (something) into (a schedule, etc); to exert great effort to insert or include (something); to include (something) despite potent reasons not to. 

  • To use a shoehorn. 

  • To force some current event into alignment with some (usually unconnected) agenda, especially when it is fallacious. 

noun
  • A smooth tool that assists in putting the foot into a shoe, by sliding the heel in after the toe is in place. This reduces discomfort and damage to the back of the shoe. By slipping it into the back of the shoe behind the heel, the user prevents the heel from squashing down the back of the shoe and causing difficulty; instead the heel slides down the smooth shoehorn, which then comes out easily once the foot is in place. 

  • Anything by which a transaction is facilitated; a medium. 

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