| 词组 | -ful |
| 释义 | -ful Nouns ending in -ful, such as cupful, spoonful, bagful, and so forth, regularly form the plural by adding -s at the end: cupfuls, spoonfuls, bagfuls. • ... he brought home two large bagfuls of stuff —Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel, 1958 The plural of these words has long been a puzzle to the public. The earliest commentary we have encountered is Dean Alford's 1866 response to a query about the plural of spoonful. The Dean prescribed spoonfuls, if it was to be written as one word; spoons full if it was to be written as two words. The same advice has been often repeated to seekers after the same information. There seem to be two factors contributing to the public's continuing perplexity. Most of these words began as two-word compounds of noun and adjective, and the noun took the plural—all will remember the nursery rhyme and its "three bags full." And somewhere, sometime, there seem to have been teachers who were convinced that internal pluralization was more proper or more elegant. We have had many letters from people who remember their teachers telling them that the proper plural is cupsful or handsful. We have not discovered what schoolbooks prompted these teachers; all of our usage books disagree. But the notion is surely alive, and the questions continue to come in. The result of the continuing uncertainty is the existence of less frequent variants such as cupsful or tea-spoonsful. These variants are called wrong by some recent handbooks. They are not wrong, but most people use cupfuls and teaspoonfuls. |
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