dustpanful

plural dustpanfuls · plural dustpansful

1. Enough to fill a dustpan.

   The last nail was driven, the last dustpanful of litter removed to its home in the new dust-hole;[…]

   1876 July, Frank Barrett, “Maggie?”, in Tinsleys’ Magazine, volume XIX, London: Tinsley Brothers, […], chapter XVII, page 113

   3 more examples

   If he have cunning and greed enough, the workhouse boy sent out to sweep an office may learn how to sweep money by the dustpan[-]ful out of his neighbours’ tills, may learn to be a famous “operator” in the money market, and to die in the blessed assurance that he is bequeathing a plum to his heirs.

   1862 October 18, “The Girl from the Workhouse”, in Charles Dickens, editor, All the Year Round. A Weekly Journal. […], volume VIII, number 182, London: […] Messrs. Chapman and Hall, […], published 1863, page 135

   The walls and ceiling of the servants’ offices and kitchen, which at the beginning of the spring had been painted white, and were immaculate in their purity, became literally a yellow-brown coffee color, darkened all over with spots as black as soot, with the defilement of these torments, of which three and four dustpanfuls a day would be swept away dead without appreciably diminishing their number.

   1882, Frances Ann Kemble, Records of Later Life, New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, pages 36–37

   If my woman had only been sharp enough to have punched out the bottoms of a couple of chairs and sprinkled a few dustpansful of dirt over the floor, her visitor’s pocketbook would have shown up quicker than scat!

   1905 November 19, Kate Burr, “Sham Samaritans”, in Buffalo Illustrated Times, volume LIXX, number 11, page 24