hearthful
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: hearthfuls
form: hearthsful
Etymology: From hearth + -ful.
Senses: examples: text: All furnaces were built with two sumps, wells or forehearths in which the molten aluminum accumulated, one hearthful or about two metric tons at a time.
ref: 1947, Transactions of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers, Volume 171:
text: They sawed and hacked and somehow managed to acquire hearthfuls of fuel to see them through.
ref: 1996, John B. Keane, More Irish Stories for Christmas, →ISBN, page 43:
glosses: The amount a fireplace can hold.
examples: text: Another bard, Rhys Goch Eryri, between the years 1385 and 1448, describes the dragon's colour as similar to a hearthful of fire in a smithy, a significant comparison for such a fire is not composed of lambent flames, but of a golden-red glow.
ref: 1969, Francis Jones, The Princes and principality of Wales, page 175:
text: Shortly before Thanksgiving, oil prices and expectations rising apace, I had accumulated a healthy hearthful of ashes which I painstakingly distributed on my lawn.
ref: 1980, Vermont Life - Volumes 35-36, page 61:
text: Give me refuge, o hearthsful of fire
ref: 1987, Michael C. Hillmann, Furūgh Farrukhzād, A lonely woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and her poetry, page 103:
text: I hugged the fat, ceiling-high contraption — I would have preferred a hearthful of roaring fire, but I was here, where rooms are heated by stoves — then set to kneading some warmth back into my cheeks and palms.
ref: 2000, Susan Sontag, In America: a novel, →ISBN, page 3:
text: A hearthful of flames flung warmth into this room, cheerily bouncing their glow off polished walnut furniture and silver-gilt.
ref: 2007, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, The Lady of the Sorrows, →ISBN:
glosses: A quantity (of something) contained within a fireplace.
examples: text: famished after a baconless dinner and a snack of cold weak tea and heavy bread, miserably shod, and with nothing to look forward to in the evening but a hearthful of wet clothes steaming before an inadequate wood fire, source of light as well as heat.
ref: 1967, Seumas O'Sullivan, The Dublin Magazine - Volume 21, page 25:
text: And if gunning over an intelligent handsome setter enriches my sport, certainly a hearthful of them on a winter evening or speckled faces peering out of our station wagon are things to value.
ref: 1971, George Bird Evans, The upland shooting life, page 213:
text: Of the company, one was on the ground insensible; another was in a yet more deplorable condition; another was nodding over a hearthful of battered pots, pieces of pipes, and oozings of ale.
ref: 2018, George Borrow, The Welsh and Their Literature, →ISBN:
glosses: A quantity (of something) sitting on a hearth outside a fireplace.
examples: text: Again he begins to weave his spell around Antonia, whispering in her ear that it was foolish of her to have given father and lover the pledge she has; so huge a sacrifice is not to be expected of one with her talent, her beauty, her charm; what can domestic felicity, even with a hearthful of brats thrown in, weigh in the scales against the applause of the adoring multitude?
ref: 1954, Ernest Newman, More opera nights, page 420:
text: And to whoever came there, to a house that was much too small to hold its contents, the result of moving from bigger dwellings, there was always a hearthful of homely welcome, with no humbug, whenever he or she entered, and the offer of a meal too almost before they sat, except to the immediate neighbours, who were as much at home there as ourselves.
ref: 1961, David John Williams, The Old Farmhouse, page 47:
text: I did not leave you when I was young and how can I quit now that we are the parents of a hearthful of children?
ref: 1963, Llazar Siliqi, Albanian contemporary prose, page 162:
text: If you want your wife to respect you for your work, you can demonstrate your respect for her work by heaping on her a hearthful of appreciation.
ref: 1998, Joey O'Connor -, Women Are Always Right and Men Are Never Wrong, →ISBN:
glosses: A homeful; enough to fill a cosy domestic situation.