plainful

comparative more plainful · superlative most plainful

1. archaicFull of lamentation.

   Beset with plainful gusts, within ye hear No sound so loud as when on curtain'd bier The death-watch tick is stilled.

   1829, John Keats, The Poetical Works, page 30

   1 more example

   Mark, O, ye beauties l—gay, and young, Mark the plainful woes, and weeping, That, from forc'd concealment sprung, Punish the sin of secret keeping.

   1780, John Bell, Bell's British Theatre: Consisting of the Most Esteemed English Plays

2. Plain; obvious.

   So plainful clear to me, it followed as the night the day.

   2012, Arlene Corwin, Circling Around Our Times, Our Culture, page 119

plural plainfuls

1. As much as a plain contains.

   Did some mythical giantess in the creation of this earth playfully prepare her desserts by the plainfuls?

   1984, Irma Tam Soong, Chinese-American Refugee: A World War II Memoir, page 59

   3 more examples

   The world is found bowing before his seat (Rev. ii. 13); as Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego stood erect amidst a plainful of prostrate “peoples, nations, and languages,” so the man “not of the world even as” his Master was not, stands erect, exceptional, singular, to be in consequence cast into the furnace for his disconformity.

   1892, The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary

   The Dutch pictures of old women and cheeses are not less but more heroic and enduring than the eighteenth-century canvases massing a dozen gods, a hundred generals, and a plainful of bleeding soldiers.

   1953, The Man From Main Street, page 173

   The chessboard they played it out on was the region of Arcadia, which has been described as a plainful of mountains.

   2017, R. A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome