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, George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, Chapter 6, p. 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, 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, p. 231,

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

   • 1680, Richard Head, The English Rogue Continued in the Life of Meriton Latroon, London: Francis Kirkman, Chapter 7, p. 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, Allan and the Holy Flower, London: Longman, Green, Chapter 19, p. 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 (translator), The Iliads of Homer, London: Nathaniell Butter, Book 2, p. 30,

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