foodful

English

Etymology

From food +‎ -ful.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈfuːdfəl/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈfudfəl/
• Hyphenation: food‧ful

Adjective

foodful (comparative more foodful, superlative most foodful)

1. (dated) Supplying food.
   • 1715, Homer, [Alexander] Pope, transl., “Book II”, in The Iliad of Homer, volume I, London: […] W[illiam] Bowyer, for Bernard Lintott […], →OCLC, page 31, lines 657–660:

     […] Athens the fair, where great Erectheus ſway'd, / That ow'd his Nurture to the blue-ey'd Maid, / But from the teeming Furrow took his Birth, / The mighty Offspring of the foodful Earth.

   • 1791 August 3, [Edmund Burke], An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, […], London: […] J[ames] Dodsley, […], →OCLC, page 120:

     The democratick commonwealth is the foodfull nurſe of ambition. […] Whenever, in ſtates which have had a democratick baſis, they have endeavoured to put reſtraints upon ambition, their methods were as violent, as in the end they were ineffectual; as violent indeed as any the moſt jealous deſpotiſm could invent.

   • 1791–1792 (published 1793), William Wordsworth, “Extracts from Descriptive Sketches Taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Alps”, in Poems […], volume I, London: […] Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, […], published 1815, →OCLC, pages 78–79:

     Mid stormy vapours ever driving by, / Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry; / Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer, / Denied the bread of life the foodful ear, / Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray, / And apple sickens pale in summer's ray; […]

   • 1894, John Muir, The Mountains of California‎^[1]:

     Of all the conifers […] , this foodful little pine is the commonest tree, and the most important.

   • 1903, Mary Hunter Austin, The Land of Little Rain‎^[2]:

     It seems that most seeds are foodful in the arid regions, most berries edible, and many shrubs good for firewood with the sap in them.