mapful

English

Etymology

map +‎ -ful

Noun

mapful (plural mapfuls)

1. A quantity (of something) described by a map.
   • 1957, Ethyl News, page c:

     Discover the mapful of fun that's around you anywhere you live (and drive).

   • 1961, Briton Hadden, Time - Volume 78, Part 2, page 9:

     And a tankful lasts a mapful of miles.

   • 1979, C. Desmond Greaves, Sean O'Casey, politics and art, page 19:

     He was confronted with a mapful of Irish place names and a population the majority of which could speak nothing else.

   • 2010, Alan Tennant, On The Wing: To the Edge of the Earth with a Peregrine Falcon, →ISBN:

     And through those vastly sophisticated lenses I imagined Niña Gorda absorbing all the intricate topography of this new land: devouring, with every wing stroke, mapfuls of precisely delineated terrain.

   • 2016, Luiz Eduardo Soares, Rio de Janeiro: Extreme City, →ISBN:

     A mapful of nautical adventures awaited him, so he bought himself a yacht and sailed the oceans on a couple of four-year expeditions.

2. A quantity (of something) that forms a map or a map-like image.
   • 1965, Ann Borowik, Lions Three: Christians Nothing, page 65:

     When he smiled, which he was doing as he came around the corner into the living room, you could see a mapful of lines and creases and a good set of teeth with one gold one on the left.

   • 2013, Indu Sundaresan, The Mountain of Light: A Novel, →ISBN:

     And the woman highest in rank usually has quite a few years tucked under her belt, and a mapful of wrinkles on her face.

   • 2017, Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel, →ISBN, page 26:

     Once in a while Werner tows Jutta as far as the entrance to Pit Nine, the largest of the mines, wrapped in noise, lit like a pilot at the center of a gas furnace, a five-story coal elevator crouched over it, cables swinging, hammers banging, men shouting, an entire mapful of pleated and corrugated industry stretching into the distance on all sides, and they watch the coal cars trundling up from the earth and the miners spilling out of warehouses with their lunch pails toward the mouth of the elevator like insects toward a lighted trap.