cloudful

cloudful

English

Etymology 1

From Middle English cloudeful, equivalent to cloud +‎ -ful.

Adjective

cloudful (comparative more cloudful, superlative most cloudful)

1. Abounding with clouds, clouded, cloudy.
   • 1888, Thomas Wright Hall, Correlation Theory of Chemical Action and Affinity, page 70:

     From the waterless land and flora, in the thundery landscape, the drying pitch of dayshine, the shine that was parching […] has actually there contracted suddenly vast masses of thunder clouds, into the thick thunder rainfall, from the cloudful sky.

   • 1915, Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar:

     Or does some brighter spirit, un forlorn,
     Send you, my little sister of the wood,
     To say to some one on a cloudful morn,
     "Life lives through death, my brother, all is good ?"

   • 1923, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1923:

     Cities at night, and cloudful skies, I've wanted; […]

2. (by extension) Dark, dimmed; troubled, turbid.
   • 1847, New Quarterly Review; Or, Home, Foreign and Colonial Journal:

     His words, accordingly, proceeding from a mind "in a dark, hot, cloudful state," were "metallic, meteoric, ball-like."

Etymology 2

From cloud +‎ -ful.

Noun

cloudful (plural cloudfuls or cloudsful)

1. The amount contained in a cloud.
   • 1848, Thomas Tod Stoddart, Angling Reminiscences, page 52:

     One might suppose himself angling in Lake Avernus, with a cloudful of hobgoblins on each side of him!

   • 2014, John Dickson Carr, Most Secret:

     A shuffling from the pit is drowned by the tumult of the top gallery, where the crowd whoops and whistles and stamps like a cloudful of angels on a spree.