Citations:mineful

English citations of mineful

Noun: "an amount sufficient to fill a mine"

						1920 1998
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

• 1920 — Harry A. Frank, Roaming through the West Indies, Blue Ribbon Books (1920), unnumbered page:

  The Americans abandoned what had become a more than useless concession, and to-day a mineful of water, colored with copper sulphates and lapping undetermined streaks of ore, remains the property of the Virgin of Cobre.

• 1998 — Duane Lockard, Coal: A Memoir and Critique, University Press of Virginia (1998), →ISBN, page 42:

  In the process it scoops out more coal in eight hours than a whole mineful of handloaders could dig in days gone by.

Noun: "(figuratively) a large amount, particularly of something obtained through mining"

					1892	1953 1973 1987 1990 1991 1996 1997 1998	2008
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

• 1892 — Horace Smith, "My Boating Song", in Interludes: Being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses, Macmillan and Co (1892), page 117:

  Oh this earth is a mineful of treasure,

  A goblet, that's full to the brim,

• 1953 — "Paris Memo", The New Yorker, 26 September 1953, page 84:

  Be there on the stroke of five; sometimes it's almost impossible to out-tip an ex-king or a man who raises diamonds by the mineful.

• 1973 — Jean Renvoizé, The Net, Stein and Day (1973), →ISBN, page 212:

  Incidents flashed through her mind one after the other, too fast to catch; that they even existed, that there was a whole mineful of ore to be examined, she could only now acknowledge.

• 1987 — Tanith Lee, Tales from the Flat Earth, Nelson Doubleday (1987), page 145:

  Three of the white stone cats of the city, big as elephants, prowled on the farther bank, before a flight of steps more than three hundred in number, and every tread laid with a mineful of sapphires.

• 1990 — Judith Rossner, His Little Women, Pocket Books (1991), →ISBN, page 185:

  I had taken all this with a mineful of salt and had not been calling Violet more often.

• 1991 — Shashi Tharoor, Show Business, Arcade Publishing (1992), →ISBN, page 169:

  When Ashok Banjara walked into producer Jagannath Choubey's glittering Diwali bash the other evening (and what a bash it was, my little cubs, more sparkle than a mineful of diamonds, […]

• 1996 — David Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal, Oxford University Press (1996), →ISBN, page 32:

  "We got a mineful of information…," he claimed, because "when they land[ed] in a port… they didn't want to sit on a ship, so they wandered around Germany in various ports."

• 1997 — Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964 (ed. Michael R. Beschloss) , Simon & Schuster (1997), →ISBN, page 178 (footnote):

  One may take this comment with a mineful of salt.

• 1998 — Jane Dickinson, "'Hole In The Head' Crackles With Good Writing, Intriguing Characters", Rocky Mountain News, 15 February 1998:

  Diamonds - a whole mineful - glow at the heart of the matter.

• 2008 — James Lear, The Secret Tunnel, Cleis Press (2008), →ISBN, page 44:

  Next came a glittering cloud, all wisps and sparkles, which eventually revealed itself to be Miss Daisy Athensasy in a swansdown-trimmed gown and a mineful of diamonds.

• 2008 — "Chairs and graces", Irish Independent, 24 April 2008:

  Anyhow, I ploughed in, only to be met with a mineful of salt – aaagh!!!