wordful

English

Etymology 1

From Middle English wordefull, from Old English wordfull, equivalent to word +‎ -ful.

Adjective

wordful (comparative more wordful, superlative most wordful)

1. Full of words; wordy; talkative; verbose
   • 1996, George Ella Lyon, A Wordful Child:

     I was a wordful child. My family says I talked before I walked.

Etymology 2

word +‎ -ful.

Noun

wordful (plural wordfuls)

1. (uncommon) An amount expressed in a word; (figuratively) a lot (of).
   • 1895 October 26, Edward Clayton Savage, “Under the Microscope”, in Judge, volume 29, number 732, page 260:

     A PUN is a wordful of fun.

   • 1922 January, “The Civil Engineer and Radio”, in The Architect and Engineer, page 106:

     And what a wordful of ignorance is daily talked and printed.

   • 1973, Paul Garson, The Great Quill, Doubleday & Company, page 170:

     "Yes, our comrades' gore floats on the water and you cry for panic, for defeat," said the commander, pounding the table.
     "Gore? So much more gore is there, wordfuls of gore. Do not persecute Sir Francis so," spoke the Baron quietly.

   • 1973 September, P. M. Woodward, “A Language Far Enough Ahead for Those Who Are Starting Now”, in High Level Programming Languages-The Way Ahead, NCC Publications, →ISBN, page 49:

     The list is not complete; but is intended to show you, that there are more basic modes than the usual INT, REAL and BOOL. CHAR is the mode for a character; BITS is a wordful of binary digits, BYTES a wordful of characters.

   • 1975, John Hollander, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, in Tales Told of the Fathers, McClelland & Stewart, page 16:

     Madman of the emptied shell whose / Creature of meaning dried and died, / He scoops up wind in it, rushing / Out with wordfuls of dead echo / Into the sucking breathlessness, / The wind not pausing to listen.

   • 1990, Eddy H. Debaere, “Optimizing Interpretive Execution” (chapter 3), in Interpretation and Instruction Path Coprocessing, MIT Press, page 123:

     In the case of a tokenized intermediate representation, several intermediate instructions fit into one machine word. Even without the use of a cache it is possible to fetch one wordful of intermediate instructions, and keep them in a processor register until they have all been executed.

   • 2000, Elizabeth Lutzeier, Bound for America, Oxford University Press, pages 103-104:

     He had never seen any other handwriting like Kate's loopy scrawl. Eamonn had heard Kate’s mother saying she took more time over the loops on her y’s and g’s than she did for a whole wordful of other letters.

Antonyms

• wordless