embellish vs tassel

embellish

verb
  • To make more beautiful and attractive by adding ornamentation; to decorate. 

  • To enhance by adding something not strictly integral or necessary. 

  • To make something sound or look better or more acceptable than it is in reality; to distort, to embroider. 

tassel

verb
  • To put forth a tassel or flower. 

  • To adorn with tassels. 

noun
  • A kind of bur used in dressing cloth; a teasel. 

  • A ball-shaped bunch of plaited or otherwise entangled threads from which at one end protrudes a cord on which the ball is hung, and which may have loose, dangling threads at the other end (often used as decoration along the bottom of garments, curtains or other hangings). 

  • A thin plate of gold on the back of a bishop's gloves. 

  • A narrow silk ribbon, or similar, sewed to a book to be put between the pages. 

  • The panicle on a male plant of maize, which consists of loose threads with anthers on them. 

  • The loose hairs at the end of a braid. 

  • A piece of board that is laid upon a wall as a sort of plate, to give a level surface to the ends of floor timbers. 

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