cannonball vs shrapnel

cannonball

noun
  • A spherical projectile fired from a smoothbore cannon. 

  • The act of jumping (typically into a swimming pool) with the legs bent and the arms wrapped around the knees to create a large splash, mimicking the flight and shape of a cannonball. 

  • An explosive-filled hollow iron sphere fused through a hole and intended to explode at a calculated distance rather than explode on impact. 

  • Something that moves fast, especially a fast train. 

  • A served ball that travels with great speed and describes little or no arc in flight. 

verb
  • To jump or dive into water, performing a cannonball landing. 

  • To career; to move rapidly. 

shrapnel

noun
  • The bullets from the aforementioned type of artillery shell. 

  • A collective term for shot, fragments, or debris thrown out by an exploding shell, bomb or landmine. 

  • An anti-personnel artillery shell used in World War I which carries a large number of individual bullets close to the target and then ejects them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike the target individually. 

  • Debris. 

  • Loose change. 

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