falter vs shuffle

falter

verb
  • To hesitate in purpose or action. 

  • To fail in distinctness or regularity of exercise; said of the mind or of thought. 

  • To cleanse or sift, as barley. 

  • To waver or be unsteady; to weaken or trail off. 

  • To stammer; to utter with hesitation, or in a weak and trembling manner. 

  • To stumble. 

  • To lose faith or vigor; to doubt or abandon (a cause). 

noun
  • An unsteadiness. 

shuffle

verb
  • To change one's position; to shift ground; to evade questions; to resort to equivocation; to prevaricate. 

  • To put in a random order. 

  • To remove or introduce by artificial confusion. 

  • To shove one way and the other; to push from one to another. 

  • To change; modify the order of something. 

  • To move in a slovenly, dragging manner; to drag or scrape the feet in walking or dancing. 

  • To use arts or expedients; to make shift. 

noun
  • An instance of walking without lifting one's feet. 

  • The act of shuffling cards. 

  • A rhythm commonly used in blues music. Consists of a series of triplet notes with the middle note missing, so that it sounds like a long note followed by a short note. Sounds like a walker dragging one foot. 

  • The act of reordering anything, such as music tracks in a media player. 

  • A dance move in which the foot is scuffed across the floor back and forth. 

  • A trick; an artifice; an evasion. 

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