the.com/handful
what fits in your palm and somehow still escapes your control
means A handful is the amount your hand can hold, or by extension a person or situation that's hard to manage.
from A plain compound of Old English roots — 'hand' plus '-ful,' meaning 'as much as the hand can hold,' the same '-ful' you see in 'mouthful' and 'spoonful.' The literal sense of a fistful of grain or coins came first; the figurative sense — a child or a task that's 'a real handful,' too much to keep a grip on — grew naturally from the image of something overflowing the fingers.
- unit origin
- ancient measure varying with whoever's hand grabbed it
- toddler synonym
- polite word for tiny domestic chaos agent
- hand math
- roughly five fingers' worth of anything graspable
- idiom flip
- means both small amount and huge problem
for instance
handful of dust — t.s. eliot's 1934 novel, title from john donne's devotion
a handful of rice — irenee guilbert's 1957 indian novel about rice farmers in bengal