Dictionary

roadful en · NOUN

Etymology

From road + -ful.

Meanings

1. Enough to fill a road.
   • Turning at the café, I was held up by a roadful of cows, changing pasture at a pace that would not excite anyone’s milk. 1997, Nicholas Kilmer, A Place in Normandy, Henry Holt and Company:
   • Now, in those suburbs where cheap trains and cheap trams are having most influence, you may see farms being covered with houses, not by pairs or by half-dozens, but by roadsful and by hundreds. 1900, Journal of the Sanitary Institute, page 322:
   • One could visualize the bursting of mailbags and the roadfuls of snarled trucks hard by the sagging loading docks. 1975, Robert John Myers, The Coming Collapse of the Post Office, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., →ISBN, page 43:
   • In the black and white, smudgy pages of the Daily Aftab and Srinagar Times and a new paper ominously called The Daily Toll, I saw roadfuls of azadi-crying people on the streets;[…]. 2011, Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator, Viking, →ISBN:
   • I saw death winkle life from shells, dive on cradle, burrow and bed, strafe roadfuls of refugees on the run from their cold bread-ovens, their blood-spattered streets. 2007, Deirdre Brennan, Ag Eitilt Fara Condair, Syracuse University Press, →ISBN, page 77:
   • The English, in particular, appear to enjoy consuming Minis by roadfuls and Mediterranean sun by the thermful. 1971, George Fisk, editor, New Essays in Marketing Theory, Boston, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., page 382:
   • The skidder moves about four times a day, cleaning up eight roadsful of logs. 1915, Logging: A Monthly Magazine of Men, Machinery and Methods, page 271:
   • By getting the household in the habit of leaving “outside shoes” in the basement, by the back door, or other main point of entry, we save ourselves the hassle of chasing down and cleaning up a roadful of dirt. 1997, Paula Jhung, “Secrets of a Company-Clean Home”, in Guests Without Grief: Entertaining Made Easy for the Hesitant Host, Fireside, →ISBN, part I (Surroundings), page 12:

Forms