ageful

English

WOTD – 1 October 2018

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /ˈeɪd͡ʒfʊl/, /-fl̩/

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Hyphenation: age‧ful

Etymology 1

A photographic portrait of an ageful, or elderly, Japanese couple by Adolfo Farsari (1841–1898), an Italian photographer who owned a photographic studio in Yokohama, Japan

From age +‎ -ful.

Adjective

ageful (comparative more ageful, superlative most ageful)

1. Aged, elderly, old.
   • 1885, W[illiam] G[orman] Wills, Melchior, London: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, part XXXV, page 341:

     Poor Hans, with watery eye, and ache at heart, / Glanced at the tambour; she is lost to him. / Hirschvogel sat crossed-legged, his glasses up, / And watched for what might hap, with ageful fire.

   • 1981, Shiv Lal, editor, The Election Archives, New Delhi: Shiv Lal, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 589:

     Of course, it also represents the courtesy of the old men of the country, with their eylids drooping into ageful insipidity and ageful sleep and their bodies leaning over the age-old sticks without which can they hardly stand.

   • 1997, Karin Blair, “Star Trek Old and New: From the Alien Embodied to the Alien Imagined”, in George McKay, editor, Yankee Go Home (& Take Me with U): Americanization and Popular Culture, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, →ISBN, page 80:

     In ST [Star Trek] the character of Spock was unique in bridging oppositions that usually remained separate. […] Spock, however, had both masculine intellect and feminine intuition, both youthful vigor and ageful wisdom, both terran humanness and extraterrestrial otherness. By scrambling traditional stereotypes, he implicitly called them into question.

   • 2011, Abigail T. Brooks, “Aesthetic Anti-ageing Surgery and Technology: Women’s Friend or Foe?”, in Kelly Joyce, Meika Loe, editors, Technogenarians: Studying Health and Illness through an Ageing, Science, and Technology Lens (Information Age Series), New York, N.Y.: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN:

     These women realise the role of technogenarian as they reconstruct their naturally ageing bodies with age-erasing technology, replacing undesired ageful faces and bodies with youthful ageless ones.

   • 2012, Léonie Sugarman, “Age”, in Colin Feltham, Ian Horton, editors, The SAGE Handbook of Counselling and Psychotherapy, 3rd edition, London, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, →ISBN, part II (Socio-cultural Perspectives), page 37, column 1:

     [Molly] Andrews (2000) sees the self, not as ageless, but as ageful, and argues that, in the same way that difference is celebrated in axes such as race, gender, religion and nationality, we should not ignore the importance of age: […]

2. (rare) Eternal, everlasting.
   • 1868, David Pitcairn, “Lecture IV. The Ages Past, and to Come”, in The Ages of the Earth. Biblical Testimonies to the Earth’s Antiquity and Progressive Development, London: Samuel Bagster and Sons; 15, Paternoster Row, →OCLC, page 130:

     In the New Testament, the substantive αιων, and αιωνιος the adjective derived from it, occur more than two hundred times. The adjective, which strictly might be rendered “full of ages” or “ageful,” is generally translated "eternal" or "everlasting," and I believe correctly; […]

Synonyms

• See Thesaurus:elderly

Related terms

• agefully
• agefulness

Translations

aged, old — see elderly

Etymology 2

From age +‎ -ful.

Noun

ageful (plural agefuls)

1. (rare) An eternity, a perpetuity.
   • 1673, J[ohn] E[achard], Some Opinions of Mr Hobbes Considered in a Second Dialogue between Philautus and Timothy, London: Printed by J. Macock, for Walter Kettilby, at the Sign of the Bishops-head in St Pauls Church-yard, →OCLC, page 125:

     I thank you, Sir; for one minutes commendations from a perſon that has kept a conſtant regiſter of Conſequences is worth an age-ful from any body elſe.

Translations

eternity — see eternity

See also

• Thesaurus:forever

Further reading

• ageing on Wikipedia.Wikipedia