cloudful
Appearance
English
[edit]Etymology 1
[edit]From Middle English cloudeful, equivalent to cloud + -ful.
Adjective
[edit]cloudful (comparative more cloudful, superlative most cloudful)
- Abounding with clouds, clouded, cloudy.
- 1888, Thomas Wright Hall, Correlation Theory of Chemical Action and Affinity, page 70:
- From the waterless land and flora, in the thundery landscape, the drying pitch of dayshine, the shine that was parching […] has actually there contracted suddenly vast masses of thunder clouds, into the thick thunder rainfall, from the cloudful sky.
- 1915, Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar:
- Or does some brighter spirit, un forlorn,
Send you, my little sister of the wood,
To say to some one on a cloudful morn,
"Life lives through death, my brother, all is good ?"
- 1923, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1923:
- Cities at night, and cloudful skies, I've wanted; […]
- (by extension) Dark, dimmed; troubled, turbid.
- 1847, New Quarterly Review; Or, Home, Foreign and Colonial Journal:
- His words, accordingly, proceeding from a mind "in a dark, hot, cloudful state," were "metallic, meteoric, ball-like."
Etymology 2
[edit]Noun
[edit]cloudful (plural cloudfuls or cloudsful)
- The amount contained in a cloud.
- 1848, Thomas Tod Stoddart, Angling Reminiscences, page 52:
- One might suppose himself angling in Lake Avernus, with a cloudful of hobgoblins on each side of him!
- 2014, John Dickson Carr, Most Secret:
- A shuffling from the pit is drowned by the tumult of the top gallery, where the crowd whoops and whistles and stamps like a cloudful of angels on a spree.