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English
Etymology 1
From sack (“bag”) + -ful.
Noun
sackful (plural sackfuls or sacksful)
- The amount a sack will contain.
A sackful of sand won't help the soil here much, but a dump truck full would.
c. 1623, Owen Felltham, Resolves, Divine, Morall, Politicall, London: Henry Seile, Essay 48, p. 155:If I be not so rich, as to sowe almes by sackfulls, euen my Mite, is beyond the superfluity of wealth: and my pen, my tongue, and my life, shal (I hope) helpe some to better treasure, then the earth affoords them.
1966, Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, New York: Modern Library, published 1992, Part 3, p. 227:You live until you die, and it doesn’t matter how you go; dead’s dead. So why carry on like a sackful of sick cats just because Herb Clutter got his throat cut?
- (figuratively) A large number or amount (of something).
1590, Henry Barrow, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church, page 231:what can the Pope say more for his sackfull of traditions?
1680, Richard Head, chapter 7, in The English Rogue Continued in the Life of Meriton Latroon, London: Francis Kirkman, page 87:[…] away we went home again fraught with a Sackful of news to tell our Master.
- 1853, uncredited translators, German Popular Tales and Household Stories: Collected by the Brothers Grimm, New York: C.S. Francis, Volume I, 74. “The Fox and the Cat,” p. 381,
- I understand a hundred arts, and have, moreover, a sackful of cunning!
1915, H. Rider Haggard, chapter 19, in Allan and the Holy Flower, London: Longman, Green, page 349:Day and night the poor fellow raved, and always about that confounded orchid, the loss of which seemed to weigh upon his mind as though it were a whole sackful of unrepented crimes.
- 1986, Hanif Kureishi, “Bradford” in Granta 20, Winter, 1986, p. 163,
- He received sackfuls of hate mail and few letters of support.
Translations
the amount a sack would contain
Etymology 2
From sack (verb) + -ful.
Adjective
sackful (comparative more sackful, superlative most sackful)
- (obsolete) Intent on plunder.
c. 1611, George Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer, London: Nathaniell Butter, Book 2, p. 30:Now will I sing the sackfull troopes, Pelasgian Argos held,