hourful

plural hourfuls · plural hoursful

1. Enough to last an hour.

   Hills to the north and to the south shut in all the dampness and shut out hoursful of sun.

   1994, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mark I. West, Westward to a High Mountain: The Colorado Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson

   3 more examples

   The silver tufts of grass have fed the air with hourfuls of mealy ferine smells and hot-backed buzzards, eagles and vultures must have chased their murderous shadows through the bush

   1966, David Gill, Men Without Evenings, page 34

   Arriving about 1 A.M. at Locknan's Station, a few log and timber huts near a creek well feathered with white oak and American elm, hickory and black walnut, we found beds and snatched an hourful of sleep.

   2011, Richard Francis Burton, The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California

   A German professor always gives good measure, a full hourful, pressed down, shaken together, and running over; no period of preliminary meditation on what he shall say and of casual conversation at the end, as often in America.

   2014, Edwin Emery Slosson, Six Major Prophets

comparative more hourful · superlative most hourful

1. Full of hours; time-consuming.

   Timed perfectly for nearly nothing, the hourful day proceeds.

   2004, Bruce Hamilton, 120 Paragraphs, page 68

   2 more examples

   And all I did was Moan and rise and moan And fall And pain away and break And slip In many hourful whiles.

   1927, The American Caravan, page 683

   Angley then drifts into his hourful, mouthful extempore, accentuated with refrains of "cast the demon away with the power of the Lord."

   1981, The Diliman Review - Volume 29, page 74