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.
1
An indefinite, but usually small, number of.
Preceded by another determiner
There are a few cars (=some, but a relatively small number) in the street.
Quite a few people (=a significant number) were pleasantly surprised.
3 more examples
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.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:
2
Used alone Not many; a small (in comparison with another number stated or implied) but somewhat indefinite number of.
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.
3 more examples
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:
3
Climatology, Meteorology, Natural sciencesOf 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.
4
Climatology, Meteorology, Natural sciences (US?) Having a 10 percent chance of measurable precipitation (0.01 inch); used interchangeably with isolated.
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.