hobble vs shuffle

hobble

verb
  • To move roughly or irregularly. 

  • To perplex; to embarrass. 

  • To walk lame, or unevenly. 

  • To fetter by tying the legs; to restrict (a horse) with hobbles. 

noun
  • One of the short straps tied between the legs of unfenced horses, allowing them to wander short distances but preventing them from running off. 

  • An unsteady, off-balance step. 

  • An odd job; a piece of casual work. 

shuffle

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

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

  • 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 hobble and shuffle occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )