1 [C] ~ (of sth) the amount of sth that can be held in one hand:
a handful of rice * She scooped up handfuls of loose earth.
2 [sing.] ~ (of sb/sth) a small number of people or things:
Only a handful of people came. * They cannot hope to win more than a handful of seats at the next election.
3 a ~ [sing.] (informal) a person or an animal that is difficult to control:
Her children can be a real handful.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for handful is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is handful a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, handful is tagged as noun.
Does handful appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — handful appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
