thimbleful
Americannoun
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thimblefuls
plural
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the amount that a thimble will hold.
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a small quantity, especially of liquid.
noun
Spelling
See -ful.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of thimbleful
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Microbiologists began by isolating the microbial DNA in a thimbleful of soil to see what genes and species were in the sample.
From Science Magazine ● Jul. 12, 2021
Yes, there are people whose skills in planning combine with their access to resources and they manage waste down to a monthly thimbleful.
From The Guardian ● Aug. 19, 2019
These 10 wines represent a mere thimbleful of the rosés produced in the United States each year.
From New York Times ● Jul. 5, 2018
Praising him for granting passage to these girls is like giving someone a round of applause for draining the ocean and then pouring in a thimbleful of water.
From Slate ● Jul. 13, 2017
Then flash to the people behind the football field fence so desperate for water that they would sell their souls for a thimbleful.
From "Dry" by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman
He left so few paintings – not more than 120 over a 40-year career – it is rightly said that he measured out his genius in thimblefuls.
From The Guardian ● Jan. 3, 2016
Watch five minutes of a remote-control back loader shifting two thimblefuls of earth across a hole, and all that will change.
From The Guardian ● Jul. 2, 2015
Max-Planck-Institute EVA For their DNA study, researchers used thimblefuls of powdered bone extracted from these three Neanderthal bones found in the Vindija cave.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 7, 2010
From thimblefuls of powdered bone, the researchers pieced together about three billion base pairs of DNA, covering about two-thirds of the Neanderthal genome.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 7, 2010
The old guard’s natural radiation sources, the thimblefuls of radium and clumps of radium-beryllium they used to make the discoveries that transformed physics—nuclear disintegration, the neutron, and artificial radioactivity—had had their day.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
