Word.ws English Dictionary

plainful

plainful adjective: full of lamentation.

Adjective

plainful (comparative more plainful, superlative most plainful)

  1. (archaic) Full of lamentation.
    • Mark, O, ye beauties l—gay, and young, Mark the plainful woes, and weeping, That, from forc'd concealment sprung, Punish the sin of secret keeping.1780, John Bell, Bell's British Theatre: Consisting of the Most Esteemed English Plays
    • Beset with plainful gusts, within ye hear No sound so loud as when on curtain'd bier The death-watch tick is stilled.1829, John Keats, The Poetical Works, page 30
  2. Plain; obvious.
    • So plainful clear to me, it followed as the night the day.2012, Arlene Corwin, Circling Around Our Times, Our Culture, page 119

Noun

plainful (plural plainfuls)

  1. As much as a plain contains.
    • The world is found bowing before his seat (Rev. ii. 13); as Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego stood erect amidst a plainful of prostrate “peoples, nations, and languages,” so the man “not of the world even as” his Master was not, stands erect, exceptional, singular, to be in consequence cast into the...1892, The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary
    • The Dutch pictures of old women and cheeses are not less but more heroic and enduring than the eighteenth-century canvases massing a dozen gods, a hundred generals, and a plainful of bleeding soldiers.1953, The Man From Main Street, page 173

Examples of plainful in a sentence

  • Did some mythical giantess in the creation of this earth playfully prepare her desserts by the plainfuls?1984, Irma Tam Soong, Chinese-American Refugee: A World War II Memoir, page 59:
  • The chessboard they played it out on was the region of Arcadia, which has been described as a plainful of mountains.2017, R. A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome:

Forms of plainful

Adjective
comparativemore plainful
superlativemost plainful
Noun
pluralplainfuls

Origin of plainful

From plain + -ful.

Questions about plainful

What does plainful mean?
Plainful means full of lamentation.
How do you use plainful in a sentence?
Did some mythical giantess in the creation of this earth playfully prepare her desserts by the plainfuls?
What part of speech is plainful?
Plainful can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near plainful in the dictionary

  1. plainest
  2. Plainfield
  3. plainfin
  4. plainfin midshipman
  5. plainfin midshipmen
  6. plainful
  7. plainfuls
  8. plainhead
  9. plainheads
  10. plainhearted
  11. plainie

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plainful (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “plainful.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plainful. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.