handful
/ˈhæn(d)fʊl/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.11 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Example Sentences
- "I put two or three corns in my mouth, liked it, stole a handful, went into my chamber, chewed it, and for two months after never failed taking toll of every pennyworth of oatmeal that came into the house: […]"
- "Knap the tongs together about a handful from the bottom."
- "This handful of men were tied to very hard duty."
- "The names of a number of the most famous North American railroads could be found in the north-east; Pennsylvania, New York Central, Baltimore & Ohio, Chesapeake & Ohio, and the Norfolk & Western, to name but a handful."
- "You tell me the velocity of a baseball as it leaves Derek Jeter's bat, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate where it will land a handful of seconds later."
- "Was it deliberate that the first week of October 1961 was chosen to conduct a national survey of passenger usage? Why October of all months, when the holiday season was over and families back at work and at school? Was this a fiddling of the figures to make an unfair case against rail-dependent resorts such as those in the West Country, Norfolk, Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire, where previously overloaded summer services would now only have a handful of locals on board?"
Etymology
From Middle English handful, hondful, from Old English handfull (“handful”), from Proto-Germanic *handufullō, *handufulliz (“handful”), from Proto-Germanic *handuz (“hand”) + *fullaz (“full”); equivalent to hand + full (“fullness, plenty”) or hand + -ful. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Hondful (“handful”), West Frisian hânfol (“handful”), Dutch handvol (“handful”), German Handvoll (“handful”), Danish håndfuld (“handful”), Swedish handfull (“handful”), Icelandic handfylli (“handful”).