Dictionary

sipful en · NOUN

Etymology

From sip + -ful.

Meanings

1. The amount ingested in a single sip.
   • She cleaned his clothes, she fed him his meals, and at the same time, hidden in the kitchen, she would take sipfuls of baby formula herself and then feed it to the baby in a kind of nourishing kiss. 1982, Caroline Leavitt, Lifelines, Seaview Books, →ISBN, page 63:
   • He looked at his wineglass, he had taken no more than a few sipfuls of wine. 2014, John Flanagan, “Arson”, in Shay Elliott and Collected Short Stories, AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 403:
   • He drank slowly, leaving sipfuls in his mouth for a long time. 1975, Sputnik, page 8:
   • And one night Joe was drinking and drinking beer from cans in the sunken living room, and several empty cans rolled around on the dusty-rose carpet by his easy chair, one or two drooling a little of that last sipful, that mixture of drink and spittle they warn you not to drink, backwash it’s called. 2004, Lucy Corin, “Box on the Beach”, in Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, Tallahassee, Fla.: FC2, →ISBN, page 60:
   • Colette’s evocation of nature’s enigmatic goings-on is very much in evidence: the cat purrs like “the rumble of a distant factory,” tame swallows land on her hair, and a spider regularly climbs down from its web to collect sipfuls of drinking chocolate from her mother’s bedside bowl. 2008, Peter Boxall, editor, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Cassell Illustrated:
   • We learnt that she had been that way since her bereavement, hardly talking even to family members and unable— or perhaps unwilling— to take any solid food, though she was forced to take sipfuls of fruit juice or a hot beverage now and then. 2002, Sruti, page 35:
   • What is the difference to the tongue’s taste between drinking a full bodied Velletri wine and vinegar and gall, and how much does he drink in that mouth’s sipful? 2013, Bernard Beatty, “The Bric-à-Brac Wars: Robert Browning and Blessed John Henry Newman”, in Jonathon Shears, Jen Harrison, editors, Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities, London; New York, N.Y.: Ashgate Publishing, →ISBN, page 92:
   • Before they prayed over the objects and drank sipfuls of the holy water they had brought, my compadre added to the altar the peyote they had gathered from our recent visit to the peyote fields of south Texas. 2003, San Diego Museum Papers, page 82:
   • The waiter did precisely what I ordered, giving me a few sipsful in the bottom of a glass. 2009, Farai Chideya, “Roni Size/Reprazent, “Brown Paper Bag””, in Kiss the Sky, Atria Books, →ISBN, page 258:
   • The wife, between sipfuls of espresso and coloratura orders to a battery of maids, did manage to impart “make-yourself-comfy” notices to her crusty husband’s really far-out friend. 2010, Wilfrido D. Nolledo, “Juego de Prenda”, in Gémino H[enson] Abad, editor, Underground Spirit: Philippine Short Stories in English, 1973 to 1982, volume I, The University of the Philippines Press, →ISBN, page 265:

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