Healthful

adj

adj ·2 syllables ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Beneficial to bodily health.

    "Hockey is an exciting and healthful form of exercise, well suited to college students […]"

  2. 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 appear cheerful and happy as he used to do when in England, he might (now that death had really taken her, poor thing!) resign her entirely, and love his wife, […]"

  3. 3
    Synonym of healthy (“evincing health”). archaic

    "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."

Adjective
  1. 1
    conducive to good health of body or mind wordnet
  2. 2
    free from filth and pathogens wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
salutaryhealthysalubrioussanitaryhealthyadvantageous

Example

More examples

"My goats are more healthful than this man's oxen will ever be."

Etymology

From Middle English helthful, helþful, helþeful, equivalent to health + -ful.

More for "healthful"

SynonymsSentencesPronunciationTranslate

Next best steps

Find stronger synonymsSee usage examplesCheck pronunciationBrowse writing guides

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.