Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word few. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word few, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say few in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word few you have here. The definition of the word few will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition offew, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one. These “legal highs” are sold for the few months it takes the authorities to identify and ban them, and then the cycle begins again.
There are a few cars (=some, but a relatively small number) in the street.
Quite a few people (=a significant number) were pleasantly surprised.
I think he's had a few drinks.
(used alone) Not many; a small (in comparison with another number stated or implied) but somewhat indefinite number of.
There are very few people who understand quantum theory.
I was expecting a big crowd at the party, but very few people (=almost none) turned up.
Your men are valiant but their number few, And cannot terrifie his mightie hoſt, […]
1999, Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems:
Already we're seeing fewer cache misses by avoiding creating cache entries for the idle task and expect to see even fewer with changes to the TLB reload code to uncache the page tables.
2020, Victoria Rosner, Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, page 62:
However, the above passage could have been written more efficiently — if Strunkian concision, using the fewest words possible, is understood as the measure of verbal efficiency.
(meteorology, of clouds) Obscuring one to two oktas (eighths) of the sky.
Tonight: A few clouds. Increasing cloudiness overnight.
NOAA definition of the term "few clouds": An official sky cover classification for aviation weather observations, descriptive of a sky cover of 1/8 to 2/8. This is applied only when obscuring phenomena aloft are present--that is, not when obscuring phenomena are surface-based, such as fog.
(meteorology, of rainfall with regard to a location)(US?) Having a 10 percent chance of measurable precipitation (0.01 inch); used interchangeably with isolated.
Usage notes
Few is used with plural nouns only; its synonymous counterpart little is used with uncountable nouns.
Although indefinite in nature, a few is usually more than two (two often being referred to as "a couple of"), and less than "several". If the sample population is say between 5 and 20, a few would mean three or four, but no more than this. However, if the population sample size were in the millions, a few could refer to several hundred items. In other words, few in this context means a very very small percentage but far more than the 3 or 4 usually ascribed to it in its use with much much smaller numbers.
Few is grammatically affirmative but semantically negative, and it can licensenegative polarity items. For example, anything usually cannot be used in affirmative sentences, but can be used in sentences with few.
He didn't do anything to help us.
*He did anything to help us. (ungrammatical)
Few people did anything to help us.
*A few people did anything to help us. (ungrammatical, since a few is a different unit of meaning from few and does not license NPIs)
Few alone emphasises smallness of number, while a few emphasises some. For example: He's a dull man with few ideas; He's a clever man with a few ideas.