dustpanful

English

Etymology

From dustpan +‎ -ful.

Noun

dustpanful (plural dustpanfuls or dustpansful)

1. Enough to fill a dustpan.
   • 1862 October 18, “The Girl from the Workhouse”, in Charles Dickens, editor, All the Year Round. A Weekly Journal. […], volume VIII, number 182, London: […] Messrs. Chapman and Hall, […], published 1863, page 135:

     If he have cunning and greed enough, the workhouse boy sent out to sweep an office may learn how to sweep money by the dustpan[-]ful out of his neighbours’ tills, may learn to be a famous “operator” in the money market, and to die in the blessed assurance that he is bequeathing a plum to his heirs.

   • 1876 July, Frank Barrett, “Maggie?”, in Tinsleys’ Magazine, volume XIX, London: Tinsley Brothers, […], chapter XVII, page 113:

     The last nail was driven, the last dustpanful of litter removed to its home in the new dust-hole; […]

   • 1882, Frances Ann Kemble, Records of Later Life, New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, pages 36–37:

     The walls and ceiling of the servants’ offices and kitchen, which at the beginning of the spring had been painted white, and were immaculate in their purity, became literally a yellow-brown coffee color, darkened all over with spots as black as soot, with the defilement of these torments, of which three and four dustpanfuls a day would be swept away dead without appreciably diminishing their number.

   • 1905 November 19, Kate Burr, “Sham Samaritans”, in Buffalo Illustrated Times, volume LIXX, number 11, page 24:

     If my woman had only been sharp enough to have punched out the bottoms of a couple of chairs and sprinkled a few dustpansful of dirt over the floor, her visitor’s pocketbook would have shown up quicker than scat!