Word.ws English Dictionary

pocketful

pocketful noun: the amount that a pocket would hold.

Noun

pocketful (plural pocketsful or pocketfuls)

  1. The amount that a pocket would hold.
    • White came to City Hall on Monday morning, entering through a basement window, with a gun and a pocketful of bullets.1978 December 9, George Mendenhall, “Harvey Milk, Mayor Moscone Slain in Shooting”, in Gay Community News, volume 6, number 20, page 1
  2. (figuratively) A small or moderate amount.
    • This Government came in with a pocketful of promises. Every time the Prime Minister (Mr. Mulroney) saw two farmers at a crossroads he had five more promises to make.1986, Canada. Parliament, House of Commons Debates, Official Report
    • Much more than a pocketful of fun awaits in this collection of rhymes and poems!2003, James Marshall, Pocketful of Nonsense

Forms of pocketful

pluralpocketsful
pluralpocketfuls

Origin of pocketful

From pocket + -ful.

Questions about pocketful

What does pocketful mean?
Pocketful means the amount that a pocket would hold.
What part of speech is pocketful?
Pocketful is a noun.
What is the plural of pocketful?
The plural of pocketful is pocketsful.

Words near pocketful in the dictionary

  1. pocketbooks
  2. pocketed
  3. pocketed up
  4. pocketer
  5. pocketers
  6. pocketful
  7. pocketfuls
  8. pockethandkerchief
  9. pockethandkerchiefs
  10. pockethandkerchieves
  11. pocketing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pocketful (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: “pocketful.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pocketful. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.