bully vs swell

bully

verb
  • To act aggressively towards. 

  • To intimidate (someone) as a bully. 

intj
  • Well done! 

adj
  • Very good. 

noun
  • A noisy, blustering, tyrannical person, more insolent than courageous; one who is threatening and quarrelsome. 

  • The small scrum in the Eton College field game. 

  • A standoff between two players from the opposing teams, who repeatedly hit each other's hockey sticks and then attempt to acquire the ball, as a method of resuming the game in certain circumstances. Also called bully-off. 

  • A hired thug. 

  • A miner's hammer. 

  • A sex worker’s minder. 

  • A companion; mate (male or female). 

  • A person who is intentionally physically or emotionally cruel to others, especially to those whom they perceive as being vulnerable or of less power or privilege. 

  • Bully beef. 

  • Any of various small freshwater or brackishwater fish of the family Eleotridae; sleeper gobies. , Gobiomorphus cotidianus]] 

swell

verb
  • To be elated; to rise arrogantly. 

  • To be turgid, bombastic, or extravagant. 

  • To protuberate; to bulge out. 

  • To cause to grow gradually in force or loudness. 

  • To grow gradually in force or loudness. 

  • To be raised to arrogance. 

  • To raise to arrogance; to puff up; to inflate. 

  • To become bigger, especially due to being engorged. 

  • To cause to become bigger. 

noun
  • A hillock or similar raised area of terrain. 

  • The act of swelling; increase in size. 

  • The front brow of a saddle bow, connected in the tree by the two saddle bars to the cantle on the other end. 

  • An upward protrusion of strata from whose central region the beds dip quaquaversally at a low angle. 

  • A division in a pipe organ, usually the largest enclosed division. 

  • A person of high social standing; an important person. 

  • Increase of power in style, or of rhetorical force. 

  • A device for controlling the volume of a pipe organ. 

  • A bulge or protuberance. 

  • A long series of ocean waves, generally produced by wind, and lasting after the wind has ceased. 

  • A gradual crescendo followed by diminuendo. 

adv
  • Very well. 

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