coatful

English

Etymology

From coat +‎ -ful.

Noun

coatful (plural coatfuls or coatsful)

The amount that a coat can hold.
- 1981, Michael Jackson, Jessica Jackson, Bruce Jackson, Your father's not coming home any more, page 53:
  And here we walk in the house with two coatfuls and armfuls of these bulbs.
- 2013, James Rollins, Rebecca Cantrell, Innocent Blood, →ISBN:
  Instead of using the coat to batter the threat away, he used its length and bulk like a huge net. He cast it out, scooping coatfuls of the fluttering horde out of the air.
A quantity that is contained within a coat.
- 1930, Life - Volume 96, page 8:
  A coatful of wind is called an admiral.
- 1970 January 19, George Whittington, “Under Eyes of Police: Burglars, Shoplifters Have Hard Time Over Weekend”, in The Clarion-Ledger, volume CXXX, number 249, Jackson, Miss., page 1:
  Two Negro women were being held after a patrolman on downtown duty watched them unload coatsful of items into a parked Cadillac.
- 1997, Attila József -, Winter Night: Selected Poems of Attila József, page 64:
  On the outskirts of town, in streetlight like wet straw flung down, off to the side on the corner, a shivering coatful of woes: a man, hunkered down like a pile of dirt, but winter still steps on his toes
- 2010, Jay Cassell, The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told, →ISBN, page 192:
  A few moments like this could make the day a lot more glorious than a coatful of birds ever could.
- 2015, Clarence E. Mulford, Tex: A Hopalong Cassidy Novel, →ISBN, page 267:
  Within easy reach of his right hand lay a coatful of rocks culled from the road-bed, no mean weapons against figures silhouetted by the lamp-lighted windows of the buildings facing the right-of-way; and close to them were half a dozen dynamite cartridges, their wicked black fuses capped and inserted.
- 2017, Adam Croft, Only the Truth:
  A girl who thinks nothing of smuggling a coatful of drugs across two national borders whilst escaping a murder scene with the prime suspect.
- 2018, Nicholas Carter, Harvest of Swords, →ISBN:
  Drowning in the harbour with a coatful of coin, hah!
A quantity that sits on a coat.
- 1977, Charles Veley, Catching up, page 149:
  And when Franz Liszt sat down at the piano, sporting shoulder-length hair and a coatful of glittering medals, the ladies threw their jewels onto the stage, battled over his gloves and even his cigar butts, and of course swooned.
- 1987, Laima Dingwall, Porcupines, →ISBN, page 23:
  With this coatful of painful weapons, it is not surprising that a porcupine has few enemies.
- 1987, Punch - Volume 293, Issues 7662-7669, page xxviii:
  Besides, how is the Oxford ethos going to cope with Business Studies? It is well-known that even the spikiest scientist, the acned misanthrope with a coatful of ballpoint pens, gets softened and blurred in his first term on an Oxford High Table.
- 2006, Paul Mandelbaum, Adriane on the Edge, →ISBN, page 241:
  The dog with the lame paw emerged now from the river and after limping over to Adriane, shook off a coatful of Ganges water and dropped his stick in front of her.