crowd vs shoehorn

crowd

verb
  • To push, to press, to shove. 

  • To carry excessive sail in the hope of moving faster. 

  • To press together or collect in numbers 

  • To press forward; to advance by pushing. 

  • To approach another ship too closely when it has right of way. 

  • To fill by pressing or thronging together 

  • To press by solicitation; to urge; to dun; hence, to treat discourteously or unreasonably. 

  • To press or drive together, especially into a small space; to cram. 

noun
  • A group of people congregated or collected into a close body without order. 

  • A fiddle. 

  • A group of people united or at least characterised by a common interest. 

  • The so-called lower orders of people; the populace, vulgar. 

  • Several things collected or closely pressed together; also, some things adjacent to each other. 

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 crowd and shoehorn occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )