[pou-er-fuh
l] 
| 1. | having or exerting great power or force. |
| 2. | physically strong, as a person: a large, powerful athlete. |
| 3. | producing great physical effects, as a machine or a blow. |
| 4. | potent; efficacious: a powerful drug. |
| 5. | having great effectiveness, as a speech, speaker, description, reason, etc. |
| 6. | having great power, authority, or influence; mighty: a powerful nation. |
| 7. | Chiefly South Midland and Southern U.S. great in number or amount: a powerful lot of money. |
| pow·er·ful (pou'ər-fəl) adj.
Very: It was powerful humid. pow'er·ful·ly adv., pow'er·ful·ness n. In the Upper Southern United States the words powerful and mighty are intensives used frequently in the same way as very: Your boy's grown powerful big. The new baby is mighty purty. Powerful is used as an adjective in some expressions: The storm did a powerful lot of harm. In the same dialect region the noun power has, in addition to its standard meaning, the sense of "a large number or amount." This sense appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as common in dialectal British English of the 18th and 19th centuries: "It has done a power of work" (Charles Dickens). All these derivative senses of power and might take advantage of the notion of strength inherent in these nouns, making them natural intensives. Colloquial English is always on the lookout for ways to make language more vivid with new intensives. We think of the Upper Southern part of the United States as linguistically conservative, but in fact it has preserved uses of power, powerful, and mighty that were innovative in their time. |