thimbleful
Americannoun
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the amount that a thimble will hold.
-
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.
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Made with just a handful of actors and a thimbleful of cash, Patrick Rea’s “They Wait in the Dark” is a gruesome ghost story that plays with our expectations.
From New York Times ● Feb. 7, 2023
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
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
They climb an echoing stairwell, rap on a door; an old woman invites them in, asks for news, insists all three of them drink a thimbleful of sherry.
From "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr
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
The idea was to re-create the kind of old-fashioned Milanese bar that might have served the distillery workers pasticceria and thimblefuls of espresso in the 1950s.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 5, 2015
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
And between the good and the bad there were others, moments colored not so much by fear or danger but by tiny heartbreaks, thimblefuls of betrayal.
From "Out of Darkness" by Ashley Hope Pérez
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.
