sackful

sack (“bag”) +‎ -ful

sackful (plural sackfuls or 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.

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

     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.

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

     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.

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

     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?

2. (figuratively) A large number or amount (of something).
   • 1590, Henry Barrow, A Brief Discoverie of the False Church‎, page 231:

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

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

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

   • 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!

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

     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.

   • 1986, Hanif Kureishi, “Bradford” in Granta 20, Winter, 1986, p. 163,

     He received sackfuls of hate mail and few letters of support.

sack (verb) +‎ -ful

sackful (comparative more sackful, superlative most sackful)

1. (obsolete) Intent on plunder.
   • c. 1611, George Chapman, transl., The Iliads of Homer‎, London: Nathaniell Butter, Book 2, p. 30:

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