few
Part of speech: det
pron
Morphological type: simple
Topics: climatology
meteorology
natural-sciences
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.
Inflected forms:
form: fewer
pos: det
tags: comparative
form: less
pos: det
tags: comparative
form: fewest
pos: det
tags: superlative
form: least
pos: det
tags: superlative
Senses:
gloss: An indefinite, but usually small, number of.
pos: det
examples: 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.
The few cheapest hotels I could find are the farthest too.
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.
gloss: Not many; a small (in comparison with another number stated or implied) but somewhat indefinite number of.
pos: det
examples: Very few did she have not to go there, did she?
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, […]
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.
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.
gloss: Obscuring one to two oktas (eighths) of the sky.
pos: det
examples: 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.
gloss: (US?) Having a 10 percent chance of measurable precipitation (0.01 inch); used interchangeably with isolated.
pos: det
gloss: Few people, few things.
pos: pron
examples: Many are called, but few are chosen.
Synonyms: little
Antonyms: many
Related words: paucity
poor
Derived words: 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
Translations: