sackful

plural sackfuls · plural sacksful

1. The amount a sack will contain.

   A sackful of sand won't help the soil here much, but a dump truck full would.

   3 more examples

   If I be not so rich, as to sowe almes by sackfulls, euen my Mite, is beyond the superfluity of wealth: and my pen, my tongue, and my life, shal (I hope) helpe some to better treasure, then the earth affoords them.

   c. 1623, Owen Felltham, Resolves, Divine, Morall, Politicall, London: Henry Seile, Essay 48, p. 155

   Potatoes were getting very scarce. If you got a sackful you could take them down to the cook-house and swap them for a water-bottleful of coffee.

   1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter VI, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC, page 77

   You live until you die, and it doesn’t matter how you go; dead’s dead. So why carry on like a sackful of sick cats just because Herb Clutter got his throat cut?

   1966, Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, New York: Modern Library, published 1992, Part 3, p. 227

   Synonyms: sackload

2. figurativelyA large number or amount (of something).

   1986, Hanif Kureishi, “Bradford” in Granta 20, Winter, 1986, p. 163, He received sackfuls of hate mail and few letters of support.

   4 more examples

   what can the Pope say more for his sackfull of traditions?

   1590, Henry Barrow, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church, page 231

   […] away we went home again fraught with a Sackful of news to tell our Master.

   1680, Richard Head, chapter 7, in The English Rogue Continued in the Life of Meriton Latroon, London: Francis Kirkman, page 87

   1853, uncredited translators, German Popular Tales and Household Stories: Collected by the Brothers Grimm, New York: C.S. Francis, Volume I, 74. “The Fox and the Cat,” p. 381, […] I understand a hundred arts, and have, moreover, a sackful of cunning!

   Day and night the poor fellow raved, and always about that confounded orchid, the loss of which seemed to weigh upon his mind as though it were a whole sackful of unrepented crimes.

   1915, H. Rider Haggard, chapter 19, in Allan and the Holy Flower, London: Longman, Green, page 349

comparative more sackful · superlative most sackful

1. obsoleteIntent on plunder.

   Now will I sing the sackfull troopes, Pelasgian Argos held,

   c. 1611, George Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer, London: Nathaniell Butter, Book 2, p. 30