foodful

comparative more foodful · superlative most foodful

1. datedSupplying food.

   Of all the conifers[…], this foodful little pine is the commonest tree, and the most important.

   1894, John Muir, The Mountains of California

   4 more examples

   […] Athens the fair, where great Erectheus ſway'd, / That ow'd his Nurture to the blue-ey'd Maid, / But from the teeming Furrow took his Birth, / The mighty Offspring of the foodful Earth.

   1715, Homer, “Book II”, in Alexander Pope, transl., The Iliad of Homer, volume I, London: […] W[illiam] Bowyer, for Bernard Lintott […], →OCLC, page 31, lines 657–660

   The democratick commonwealth is the foodfull nurſe of ambition. […] Whenever, in ſtates which have had a democratick baſis, they have endeavoured to put reſtraints upon ambition, their methods were as violent, as in the end they were ineffectual; as violent indeed as any the moſt jealous deſpotiſm could invent.

   1791 August 3, [Edmund Burke], An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, […], London: […] J[ames] Dodsley, […], →OCLC, page 120

   Mid stormy vapours ever driving by, / Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry; / Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer, / Denied the bread of life the foodful ear, / Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray, / And apple sickens pale in summer's ray; […]

   1791–1792 (date written; published 1793), William Wordsworth, “[Juvenile Pieces.] Extracts from Descriptive Sketches Taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Alps.”, in Poems […], volume I, London: […] Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […], published 1815, →OCLC, pages 78–79

   It seems that most seeds are foodful in the arid regions, most berries edible, and many shrubs good for firewood with the sap in them.

   1903, Mary Hunter Austin, The Land of Little Rain