Jailful
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Enough to fill a jail.
"The news of his approach struck terror into the hearts of the negroes, who immediately stopped preparing to massacre the whites, and in a few hours the only traces that could be found of the insurrection were several jailfuls of “ringleaders” arrested on suspicion, and swampfuls of followers who had run away to escape the vengeance of the whites."
Example
More examples"The news of his approach struck terror into the hearts of the negroes, who immediately stopped preparing to massacre the whites, and in a few hours the only traces that could be found of the insurrection were several jailfuls of “ringleaders” arrested on suspicion, and swampfuls of followers who had run away to escape the vengeance of the whites."
Etymology
From jail + -ful.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.