Handful

How to spell handful

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce handful

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does handful mean?

1. nounA quantity that fills the hand, or a small number of people or things.
2. nounInformally, a person or animal that is hard to control or manage.

Handful in a sentence

• He scattered a handful of seeds across the freshly dug bed.

• The new puppy is a real handful during the morning walk.

• Only a handful of guests had arrived by the time the meal started.

• Their youngest child can be quite a handful at bedtime.

Where does handful come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, built entirely from Old English parts. The first element, hand, has meant the hand of the body since the earliest Old English texts and is shared with the wider Germanic family, appearing as Hand in German and hand in Dutch. The second element, the suffix -ful, comes from full and once worked literally, so a handful was simply 'as much as the hand can hold'. By the late Old English and early Middle English period the compound was being written as a single word and used for that scooped quantity. Over time it stretched figuratively to mean a small number of things and, more recently and informally, a person or animal who is troublesome to manage. Note that the suffix keeps just one l, which is the usual spelling trap, since the standalone word full has two.

How the word is built

• hand (the hand)
• -ful (suffix meaning 'the amount that fills')