gustful

English

Etymology 1

From gust +‎ -ful.

Adjective

gustful (comparative more gustful, superlative most gustful)

1. gusty
   • 1874, Alfred Tennyson, “The Holy Grail”, in Idylls of the King (The Works of Alfred Tennyson; VI), cabinet edition, London: Henry S. King & Co., […], →OCLC, page 102:

     [T]hey sat / Beneath a world-old yew-tree, darkening half / The cloisters, on a gustful April morn / That puff'd the swaying branches into smoke / Above them, […]

2. (obsolete) tasty; good-tasting
   • 1669, Kenelm Digby, The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened:

     The said season being passed, there is no danger or difficulty to keep it [preserved meat] gustful all the year long.

Derived terms

• gustfulness

Etymology 2

From gust +‎ -ful.

Noun

gustful (plural gustfuls or gustsful)

1. (uncommon) An amount carried in a gust. [from 20th c.]
   • 1909, Jane Barlow, “A Woman Ever Vext”, in Irish Ways, London: George Allen & Sons, page 144:

     The wind, ruffling up the lane, drove a gustful of loose sand against her like spray, and bore in the hollow boom of breaking waves, which seemed to take her breath.

   • 1912 December, “Have Picture Theaters Come to Stay?”, in The Cinema News and Property Gazette, volume I, number II, page 19:

     In the pictures we get a view of miles of scenery, the mountain tops, the horsemen galloping along the road, the soldiers charging a position. We see the waving of the tree branches, the wind blowing the girl's tresses. We get nature in gustfuls.

   • 1915, H. G. Wells, “The Beginning of "The Wild Asses of the Devil"” (chapter VIII), in Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, George H. Doran Company, page 233:

     […] when the southwest wind savaged his villa and roared in the chimneys and slapped its windows with gustsful of rain and promised to wet that author thoroughly and exasperatingly down his neck and roimd his wrists and ankles directly he put his nose outside his door.

   • 1955, Anthony West, chapter 3, in Heritage, Random House, page 148:

     The birds began to drop, loose bundles of feathers that bounced as they hit the ground, and made an ankh as the last gustful of wind was knocked out of them.

   • 1992 [1991], Charles Lister, “Fondi” (chapter 4), in Between Two Seas: A Walk Down the Appian Way, Great Britain: Minerva, page 51:

     […] as a tree trunk stirs somewhere in front into a dark-cloaked shepherd boy rising like a goblin gustful of leaves and staring from under his old cloth cap, dumb till I’m past him.

Anagrams

• gutfuls, gutsful

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “gustful”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)