graveful

English

Etymology

From grave +‎ -ful.

Noun

graveful (plural gravefuls or gravesful)

1. Enough to fill a grave.
   • 1866, John Whittaker, “Billy Blake’s Best Coffin. A Lancashire Sketch.”, in Once a Week, Bradbury, Evans, & Co., page 15:

     Cold damp sweat oozed from my temples; there was a dull heavy pressure upon my chest, as if there was the weight of a graveful of earth upon it; […] My senses left me, and when the men took me out, I seemed very likely to have real need of the coffin into which they had put me for fun.

   • 1871 April, “A Week in Paris”, in The Cornhill Magazine, volume XXIII, number 136, London: Smith, Elder & Co., page 488:

     Already the ivy has been carefully trained over it from top to bottom, and in front of it is a triple tomb, where a little knot of Frenchmen sleep between two gravefuls of the enemy.

   • [c. 1885–1900], Joseph S[amuel] Exell, The Biblical Illustrator; or, Anecdotes, Similes, Emblems, Illustrations; Expository, Scientific, Georgraphical, Historical, and Homiletic, Gathered from a Wide Range of Home and Foreign Literature, on the Verses of the Bible, Romans, volume II, Fleming H. Revell Company, page 381:

     Christ tears away the turf from our assumption of virtue and exposes a graveful of “dead men’s bones and uncleanness.”

   • 1987, Rony Robinson, “Beside the Seaside”, in The Beano, London, Boston, Mass.: Faber and Faber, →ISBN, part three, page 71:

     It’s always cold on this Yorkshire hillside where Anne Brontë lies dead under a graveful of red flowers.

   • 1996, Judith Reitman, Bad Blood: Crisis in the American Red Cross, Kensington Books, →ISBN, page 214:

     In a chilling affirmation of Dr. Donald Francis’s 1982 predictions, the Common Factor, a newsletter published by the Committee of Ten Thousand, who had brought the lawsuit, wrote twelve years later, “Like the canaries in the coal mine, persons with hemophilia serve as the early warning system for the nation’s blood supply. We all contracted hepatitis B, then non A-non B hepatitis (hepatitis C), and then HIV. The hemophilia community has provided gravesful of information about the safety of the blood supply.”

   • 1996, Felicity Savage, “Delta City”, in Garden of Salt; Humility Garden; Delta City, GuildAmerica Books, →ISBN, page 499:

     “There’s so much hatred,” Elicit said bitterly. “Pati doesn’t know what a graveful of maggots he has nurtured here. He can’t.”

   • 1996, Elizabeth Ironside [pseudonym; Catherine Manning], The Accomplice, Hodder & Stoughton, →ISBN, page 74:

     We have people bringing us animal bones, thinking they’re human. And I’ve had times when I’ve been faced with a graveful of bones and I’ve had to work out how many individuals there were.

   • 2018, Mark Zaslove, Death and Taxes (Tales of a Badass IRS Agent), Aperient Press, →ISBN, page 72:

     I took the job, the raise, and the cubicle, and I took my pride and stuffed it deep inside, jack-booted it down and covered it up with a graveful of dirt and regrets.