Few vs Hew - What's the difference?
few | hew |
(preceded by another determiner) An indefinite, but usually small, number of.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= (used alone) Not many; a small (in comparison with another number stated or implied) but somewhat indefinite number of.
(meteorology, of clouds) (US?) Obscuring one eighth to two eighths of the sky.
(meteorology, of rainfall with regard to a location) (US?) Having a 10 percent chance of measurable precipitation (0.01 inch); used interchangeably with isolated.
To chop away at; to whittle down; to mow down.
* Shakespeare
* 1912 : (Edgar Rice Burroughs), (Tarzan of the Apes), Chapter 6
To shape; to form.
* Bible, Is. li. 1
* Alexander Pope
(US) To act according to, to conform to; usually construed with (to).
* 1905 , Albert Osborn, : A Biography ,
* 1998 , and Lawrence Davidson, Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines , Collectors Press, Inc., ISBN 1-888054-12-3, page 103,
* 2008 , , Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik , Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-12990-8, page 28,
* {{quote-news
, year=2012
, date=May 27
, author=Nathan Rabin
, title=TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “New Kid on the Block” (season 4, episode 8; originally aired 11/12/1992)
, work=The Onion AV Club
*{{quote-web
, date =2013-10-02
, first =Alex
, last =Pappademas
, title =Leuqes! LEUQES! LEUQES!'' – The ''Shining sequel and what it says about Stephen King
, site =Grantland.com
, url =http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9751517/the-shining-sequel-career-stephen-king
, accessdate = 2013-10-16
}}
*:King recovered the rights on the condition that he'd stop publicly disparaging Kubrick's version. "For a long time I hewed that line," he told CBS News in June. "And then Mr. Kubrick died. So now I figured, what the hell. I've gone back to saying mean things about it."
(obsolete) hue; colour
(obsolete) shape; form
Destruction by cutting down.
* Spenser
As proper nouns the difference between few and hew
is that few is (british) the pilots who fought in the battle of britain while hew is .few
English
Determiner
A new prescription, passage=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.}}
- I was expecting lots of people at the party, but very few''''' (=''almost none'') ''turned up. Quite a '''few''' of them'' (=''many of them'') ''were pleasantly surprised. I don't know how many drinks I've had, but I've had a '''few . [This usage is likely ironic.]
- 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 phenomenon aloft are present--that is, not when obscuring phenomenon are surface-based, such as fog.
Usage notes
* (term) is used with plural nouns only; its synonymous counterpart (little) is used with 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 way over the 3 or 4 usually ascribed to it its use with much much smaller numbers. : (term) is grammatically affirmative but semantically negative, and it can license negative polarity items. For example, lift a finger usually cannot be used in affirmative sentences, but can be used in sentences with (term). *: He didn't lift a finger to help us. *: *He lifted a finger to help us. (ungrammatical) *: Few people lifted a finger to help us. *: *A few people lifted a finger to help us. (ungrammatical) *: *Fewer people lifted a finger to help us. (ungrammatical)Synonyms
* little (see usage)Antonyms
* manyDerived terms
* a few * quite a fewAntonyms
* manyReferences
* Meteorology (both senses) *:NOAA Glossary: f
hew
English
Etymology 1
From (etyl) hewen, from (etyl) . See also (l).Verb
- Hew them to pieces; hack their bones asunder.
- Among other things he found a sharp hunting knife, on the keen blade of which he immediately proceeded to cut his finger. Undaunted he continued his experiments, finding that he could hack and hew splinters of wood from the table and chairs with this new toy.
- to hew out a sepulchre
- Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn .
- rather polishing old works than hewing out new
]Jennings & Graham, [http://books.google.com/books?id=I3UEAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA428&dq=hewed page 428,
- Few men measured up to his standard of righteousness; he hewed to the line.
- Inside the stories usually hewed to a consistent formula: no matter how outlandish and weird the circumstances, in the end everything had to have a natural, if not plausible, ending—frequently, though not always, involving a mad scientist.
- Faculty members and students alike were buzzing with the fashionable nostrums that dominated U.S. education discourse in the late sixties,
citation, page= , passage=Hewing to the old comedy convention of beginning a speech by randomly referencing something in eyesight, Homer begins his talk about the birds and the bees by saying that women are like refrigerators: they’re all about six feet tall and weigh three hundred pounds and make ice cubes. }}
Derived terms
* hewer * rough-hewEtymology 2
Noun
(en noun)- (Chaucer)
- (Spenser)
- Of whom he makes such havoc and such hew .
