Few Meaning
/fjuː/Definition, CEFR level A1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
detAn indefinite, but usually small, number of.
detNot many; a small (in comparison with another number stated or implied) but somewhat indefinite number of.
Sentence Examples
It took me more than two hours to translate a few pages of English.
Will you listen to me for a few minutes?
I recognized a few of the other people.
Synonyms & Antonyms
Synonyms:
None
Antonyms:
CEFR Practice Quiz
Only a ____ students passed the extremely difficult final exam.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Only a ____ people attended the late-night lecture, which made for a very intimate and quiet atmosphere.
Word Origin & History
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.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"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."
— 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:
"Your men are valiant but their number few,
And cannot terrifie his mightie hoſt, […]"
— 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:
"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."
— 1999, Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems:
"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."
— 2020, Victoria Rosner, Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, page 62:
Explore More A1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
Only a ____ students passed the extremely difficult final exam.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Only a ____ people attended the late-night lecture, which made for a very intimate and quiet atmosphere.