Sentence examples for spadeful from inspiring English sources
noun
The amount held by (or moved by) a spade (shovel) at once. A shovelful.
He spoke at the service; afterward, as is the custom in Jewish ceremonies, the mourners filed forward one by one to shovel a spadeful of dirt onto the casket from a huge mound of earth beside the grave.
Even before the first spadeful of earth was turned, before the first boulder of Manhattan schist was blasted, a forest of exclamation points began sprouting with what was dubbed the city's largest individual demolition contract ever.
This week the BBC threw another spadeful of dirt on the grave by decreeing in its latest style guide that Fleet Street was no longer a useful synonym for the print media.
Our last contorted expression will be a tragic mixture of horror and embarrassment as someone shovels a spadeful of icy gravel on to our face and those of every other corpse in the limey pit.
While the wife of the President of the United States is not actively involved in negotiating world debt or waging war on terror, and is more likely to be seen digging a spadeful of organic compost into the White House garden or hugging a small child, she is nonetheless a powerful fashion role model if she so wishes to be.
The first spadeful revealed five crocosmia corms stacked vertically, like buns in a bakery.
The day's work ends around five, in time for tea and chatter about this or that spadeful of triumph or mystery.
The Bergmanns were dumbfounded that in all that time, not a spadeful of contaminated soil had been removed from their property, and that all the remediation had entailed was the monitoring of wells and the bailing of contaminated ground water.
They still tell, with spadefuls of nostalgia, of how this giant of the cold war would give his security men the slip and slope off in the small hours to join the fishermen at work.
Henderson's and the Vegetarian Society use soy sauce and Veg Web Worcestershire sauce (presumably a vegetarian variety) and Marmite – the last, which I also found a useful addition to my nut roast, rides to the rescue again, supplying umami in salty spadefuls.
The Des Moines Register called his speech "so intemperate, so unfair, so dangerous in its implications that it cannot but turn many spadefuls in the digging of the grave of his influence in this country".
