I remember an article in a gun magazine back in the 1900s where the author had to dance around the "ball powder" question to avoid legal landmines ostensibly, as he was discussing specifically the AA line of powders and it was a high enough profile article that the Hodgdon and Winchester folks would probably see it. He noted that Spherical and Ball were registered trademarks, and settled on the term "globular" to describe the basic type regardless of manufacturer.
We as reloaders generally use the terms interchangeably for any generally spherical powder produced by the St Marks/Olin process. Whether it is a nearly true sphere such as H380 or a very relatively flake like HP 38, or a near dust like H110 or random like W244. For our purposes, they all seem to meter quite well, with some such as H110, H335 and H380 throwing as consistently as I can trickle to a scale.
I find it interesting that the physical shape of the grains will change from lot to lot, especially with the rifle powders. I loaded quite a bit of W748 back in the late 1990s and it was a rather flat, chunky "sphere." My more recent samples have been very uniform and quite spherical, approaching H380 geometry. H335 has been the opposite for me. I'm sure this is done to dial in the burn rate for these slower burning powders.
