Also -full. [f. SPADE sb.1 + -FUL.] A quantity that fills a spade; as much as a spade can hold or take up at one time.
1643. Trapp, Comm. Gen. xxx. 27. His mouth shall be filled with a spade-ful of mould.
1720. Lond. Gaz., No. 5865/2. His Excellency was to raise the first Spadeful of Earth at the opening of the Dyke.
1796. Morse, Amer. Geog., II. 311. Five or six spadefuls of snow.
1826. W. A. Miles, Deverel Barrow, 18. Every spadeful of earth presented a mixture of pottery, charcoal, and flints.
1890. Science-Gossip, XXVI. 161. When we had dug out one or two spadefuls of soil.
fig. 1886. Stevenson, Lett. (1899), II. 13. It is painful, yet very pleasant to dig into the past of a dead friend, and find him, at every spadeful, shine brighter.
