marketful

English

Etymology

market +‎ -ful

Noun

marketful (plural marketfuls or marketsful)

1. A quantity that fills a market.
   • 1849, The Spectator - Volume 22, page 705:

     There are traditions of whole towns set to make whole marketfuls of goods after the demand for such goods had ceased —Paisley, for instance, could have supplied the United Kingdom with grey shawls, when Yorkshire had clothed it in red shawls.

   • 1994, Jean Genet, The Blacks: A Clown Show, →ISBN:

     It's no longer a Negro trailing at your skirt; it's a marketful of slaves, all sticking out their tongues.

   • 2000, Sholem Aleichem, Nineteen To the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things, →ISBN:

     Had considerable properties as well, houses, a marketful of shops, owned a wood or two — two huge tracts of timberland, actually.

   • 2001, Eugene C. Kennedy, Sara C. Charles, On Becoming a Counselor, →ISBN:

     For most of us, this is a near automatic reflex after a life spent giving our opinions on classes, movies, candidates, and marketsful of merchandise: the first question seems inborn, "What did you think of that?"

   • 2003, Katy Gardner, Losing Gemma, →ISBN:

     Now we were competing with ox-drawn carts, dark, sweat-shiny men carrying piles of pots or bricks on their heads, scooters conveying whole families, and a marketful of vendors whose wares spilled from the broken pavements on to the streets.

2. A sufficient number of potentially interested consumers.
   • 1954, American Lumberman & Building Products Merchandiser, page 27:

     Ripplewood creates a presold marketful of prospects ripe for your order book.

   • 1957, Pacific Drug Review - Volume 69, page 49:

     First there was Mr. Newmarket, symbol of the new male customers for prophylactics sent to you by doctors as a result of Schmid's Exclusive Trichomonal Re-infection Control Program —the program that created a whole new marketful of prophylactics users.

   • 1959, Printers' Ink - Volume 269, page 2:

     Out in California's incredibly productive Inland Valley, there's a whole marketful of people with billions to spend.