hourful

English

Etymology 1

From hour +‎ -ful.

Noun

hourful (plural hourfuls or hoursful)

1. Enough to last an hour.
   • 1966, David Gill, Men Without Evenings, page 34:

     The silver tufts of grass have fed the air with hourfuls of mealy ferine smells and hot-backed buzzards, eagles and vultures must have chased their murderous shadows through the bush

   • 1994, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mark I. West, Westward to a High Mountain: The Colorado Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson:

     Hills to the north and to the south shut in all the dampness and shut out hoursful of sun.

   • 2011, Richard Francis Burton, The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California:

     Arriving about 1 A.M. at Locknan's Station, a few log and timber huts near a creek well feathered with white oak and American elm, hickory and black walnut, we found beds and snatched an hourful of sleep.

   • 2014, Edwin Emery Slosson, Six Major Prophets:

     A German professor always gives good measure, a full hourful, pressed down, shaken together, and running over; no period of preliminary meditation on what he shall say and of casual conversation at the end, as often in America.

Etymology 2

From hour +‎ -ful.

Adjective

hourful (comparative more hourful, superlative most hourful)

1. Full of hours; time-consuming.
   • 1927, The American Caravan, page 683:

     And all I did was Moan and rise and moan And fall And pain away and break And slip In many hourful whiles.

   • 1981, The Diliman Review - Volume 29, page 74:

     Angley then drifts into his hourful, mouthful extempore, accentuated with refrains of "cast the demon away with the power of the Lord."

   • 2004, Bruce Hamilton, 120 Paragraphs, page 68:

     Timed perfectly for nearly nothing, the hourful day proceeds.