dressful

English

Etymology 1

dress +‎ -ful

Noun

dressful (plural dressfuls)

1. As much as is within, on, or held by a dress.
   • 1943, Walter Beebe Wilder, Bounty of the Wayside, page 221:

     The next time we were out she gathered a whole dressful of Amanitas, but all she got for her trouble was a severe lecture on the virtues of keeping her dress clean.

   • 1957, Leon Arden, The Savage Place - Volume 1664, page 26:

     “Boy, what a dressful!” He pretended to lunge at her like an animal.

   • 1970, The New Yorker - Volume 46, Issue 5, page 3:

     Left, a dressful of sunbursts, navy, red and white acetate, 8 to 16, $95.

   • 1987, Denis Hirson, The house next door to Africa, page 96:

     She lays my body out between the charred blunt stubble and the sun, seals my eyes shut with her tongue; then fetches dressfuls of freshly scythed grass to pour over me, all the while singing those tone-deaf songs she knows.

Etymology 2

dress +‎ -ful

Adjective

dressful (comparative more dressful, superlative most dressful)

1. Pertaining to dresses or dressing.
   • 1918, Littell's Living Age - Volume 299, page 398:

     Mary Jane's dressful opportunities are very limited, and half the fun of life with women is dressing.

   • 2001, Jack Apostol, Not of Stones, But of Words, page 429:

     As John walks up the steps, the faithful dove glides in to him and unwinds silk from cocoons salvaged from the Egyptian ship and it flies with the precision of spiders to webs, birds building a nest and bees a hive, then binds the whole from the clouds and cloudy incense into a band of cloth, light as silk adorned in a breeze to wrap his body in a dressful cover as to be prepared to the world.

   • 2015, William Dean Howells, The Complete Travel Books of William Dean Howells:

     This may have expressed an inner condition, or it may have been a sympathetic response to the advances of the flowers in the pretty beds and parterres so fancifully designed by the gardeners of the administration, or it may have been a token of the helpless submission to which the windows of the milliners and modistes reduced all comers of the dressful sex.