healthful

Adjective

healthful (comparative healthfuller or more healthful, superlative healthfullest or most healthful)

1. Beneficial to bodily health.
   • Hockey is an exciting and healthful form of exercise, well suited to college students […]1906, Princeton Alumni Weekly, volume 7, page 210
   • The advertisement [published in 1856] concluded with the announcement that the excursion was being run "to afford the industrious classes the opportunity of enjoying the healthful and invigorating sea-breezes of Southport, and the luxury of sea-bathing, or the numerous objects of interest and...1951 December, “Notes and News: Reduced Fares for Ladies”, in Railway Magazine, pages 852-853
2. Conducive to moral or spiritual prosperity; salutary.
   • She trusted it was a sign that his mind was recovering a more healthful state, that he was not obliged to refer to his imagination, and, by giving her an ideal existence, compel himself to love her as the representative of another; surely, if he could do so long without the real Margarita, and...1842, [anonymous collaborator of Letitia Elizabeth Landon], chapter XXXIII, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 128
   • As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.1926, Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, Folio Society, published 2008, page 30
3. (archaic) Synonym of healthy (“evincing health”).
   • His fair hair waved long and freely over a white and unwrinkled forehead: the life of a camp and the suns of Italy had but little embrowned his clear and healthful complexion, which retained much of the bloom of youth.1835, [Edward Bulwer-Lytton], “The Knight of Provençe, and His Proposal”, in Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes. […], volume I, London: Saunders and Otley, […], →OCLC, book II (The Revolution), page 184

   Synonyms:

   healthy