A bucketful is the amount that fills a bucket. When you carry a bucketful of water from the sink to water your garden, you're carrying as much water as the bucket can hold. If you scoop a bucketful of sand at the beach, you've filled your bucket to the top.

The word describes a practical unit of measurement that people have used for centuries, long before anyone invented measuring cups or liter bottles. Farmers might feed their chickens a bucketful of grain each morning. A construction worker might need three bucketfuls of concrete (notice how the plural works) to finish a project.

People also use bucketful figuratively to describe large amounts of anything. A science teacher might have bucketfuls of knowledge about the solar system. After a hard day, someone might joke that they've cried bucketfuls of tears. The word suggests abundance, like when your grandmother says she has bucketfuls of love for her grandchildren. It's a warm, homey way to express “a whole lot of something.”