marketful

plural marketfuls · plural marketsful

1. A quantity that fills a market.

   It's no longer a Negro trailing at your skirt; it's a marketful of slaves, all sticking out their tongues.

   1994, Jean Genet, The Blacks: A Clown Show, →ISBN

   4 more examples

   There are traditions of whole towns set to make whole marketfuls of goods after the demand for such goods had ceased —Paisley, for instance, could have supplied the United Kingdom with grey shawls, when Yorkshire had clothed it in red shawls.

   1849, The Spectator - Volume 22, page 705

   Had considerable properties as well, houses, a marketful of shops, owned a wood or two — two huge tracts of timberland, actually.

   2000, Sholem Aleichem, Nineteen To the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things, →ISBN

   For most of us, this is a near automatic reflex after a life spent giving our opinions on classes, movies, candidates, and marketsful of merchandise: the first question seems inborn, "What did you think of that?"

   2001, Eugene C. Kennedy, Sara C. Charles, On Becoming a Counselor, →ISBN

   Now we were competing with ox-drawn carts, dark, sweat-shiny men carrying piles of pots or bricks on their heads, scooters conveying whole families, and a marketful of vendors whose wares spilled from the broken pavements on to the streets.

   2003, Katy Gardner, Losing Gemma, →ISBN

2. A sufficient number of potentially interested consumers.

   Ripplewood creates a presold marketful of prospects ripe for your order book.

   1954, American Lumberman & Building Products Merchandiser, page 27

   2 more examples

   First there was Mr. Newmarket, symbol of the new male customers for prophylactics sent to you by doctors as a result of Schmid's Exclusive Trichomonal Re-infection Control Program —the program that created a whole new marketful of prophylactics users.

   1957, Pacific Drug Review - Volume 69, page 49

   Out in California's incredibly productive Inland Valley, there's a whole marketful of people with billions to spend.

   1959, Printers' Ink - Volume 269, page 2