few
Language: English
Part of speech: det
Pronunciation: ipa: /fjuː/
ipa: /fɪu̯/
ipa: [fjʉː]
ipa: [fjʉ͡u]
rhymes: -uː
homophone: phew stripped-by-parse_pron_post_template_fn
Forms: form: fewer
form: less
form: fewest
form: least
Etymology: From Middle English fewe, from Old English fēaw (“few”), from Proto-West Germanic *fau, from Proto-Germanic *fawaz (“few”), from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂w- (“few, small”).
Cognate with Old Saxon fā (“few”), Old High German fao, fō (“few, little”), Old Norse fár (“few”), Gothic 𐍆𐌰𐌿𐍃 (faus, “few”). Also related with Latin paucus (“little, few”) and pauper (“poor”), from which latter English poor and pauper; see these.
Senses: examples: text: There are a few cars (=some, but a relatively small number) in the street.
text: Quite a few people (=a significant number) were pleasantly surprised.
raw_tags: This usage is likely ironic.
text: I think he's had a few drinks.
text: The few cheapest hotels I could find are the farthest too.
text: No sooner has a [synthetic] 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.
ref: 2013 August 10, “A new prescription”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8848, London: The Economist Group, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 10 Aug 2020:
qualifier: preceded by another determiner
glosses: An indefinite, but usually small, number of.
examples: text: Very few did she have not to go there, did she?
text: I was expecting a big crowd at the party, but very few people (=almost none) turned up.
text: Your men are valiant but their number few,
And cannot terrifie his mightie hoſt, […]
ref: c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire; London: Scolar Press, 1973, →ISBN, Act III, scene iii:
text: 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.
ref: 1999, Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems:
text: 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.
ref: 2020, Victoria Rosner, Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, page 62:
glosses: Not many; a small (in comparison with another number stated or implied) but somewhat indefinite number of.
raw_tags: used alone
examples: text: Tonight: A few clouds. Increasing cloudiness overnight.
text: 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.
topics: climatology
meteorology
natural-sciences
glosses: Obscuring one to two oktas (eighths) of the sky.
raw_tags: of clouds
topics: climatology
meteorology
natural-sciences
glosses: (US?) Having a 10 percent chance of measurable precipitation (0.01 inch); used interchangeably with isolated.
raw_tags: of rainfall with regard to a location
Synonyms: english: see usage
translation: see usage
word: little
Derived terms: a fair few
a few
a few clowns short of a circus
a few fries short of a Happy Meal
a few roos loose in the top paddock
a few spanners short of a tool box
a good few
cover-few
few and far between
few cards short of a full deck
few cards shy of a full deck
few-flowered sedge
fewfold
fewly
fewness
few sandwiches short of a picnic
few-shot
few-shot learning
have a few
have a few too many
in a few shakes
man of few words
precious few
pull a few strings
quite a few
some few
to name a few
woman of few words
you've got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette
Related terms: paucity
poor