handful

«handful» in Mova's school dictionary: The amount you can hold in one hand: «a handful of sweets» — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples, with 4 sentences of Mova's corpora that use it.

part of speech

noun (a handful, handfuls)

meaning for a pupil

1) The amount you can hold in one hand: «a handful of sweets». tree →

2) A small number of people or things: «Only a handful of children came». tree →

3) (informal, a handful) A person or animal that is hard to control: «The puppy is a handful». tree →

sense in the lessons

In cooking and science, «a handful» is a rough, not exact, measure. In maths word problems «a handful» means only a few, not a fixed number. In everyday life «a real handful» describes a lively, naughty child or pet. Phrases: «a handful of», «a real handful».

examples

• She grabbed a handful of popcorn. tree →
• Add a handful of nuts to the salad. tree →
• Only a handful of people came to the meeting. tree →
• Our new puppy is a real handful! tree →
• He threw a handful of seeds to the birds. tree →
• A handful of stars shone through the clouds. tree →
• Twenty thousand Persian soldiers had fallen before that handful of men. tree →

note

Plural: handfuls (also handsful, rare). Spelling: one l at the end. «A handful» is never an exact number; in a maths problem you need the actual number. «A handful of» + plural noun: a handful of coins.

In the corpora

• "A handful" means hard to control.
• Harry in Manchester grabbed a handful of sweets from the pick-and-mix because nobody was watching.
• Soil is alive: one handful of good soil holds more tiny living things than there are people on Earth.
• Better is a handful of quietness, than both the hands full of labour and striving after wind.

Trees and pragmatics

Every meaning and example of «handful» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.