Meager vs Few - What's the difference?
meager | few |
Having little flesh; lean; thin.
Poor, deficient or inferior in amount, quality or extent; paltry; scanty; inadequate; unsatisfying.
* {{quote-book
, year=1607
, author=Thomas Walkington
, title=The Optick Glasse of Humors, or, The touchstone of a golden temperature, or ...
, page=54
* {{quote-book
, year=1637
, author=William Shakespeare
, title=The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice: With the extreame crueltie of Shylocke ...
, page=E5
(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.
As an adjective meager
is having little flesh; lean; thin.As a verb meager
is to make lean.As a determiner few is
an indefinite, but usually small, number of.As a pronoun few is
few people, few things.As a proper noun Few is
the pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain.meager
English
(wikipedia meager)Alternative forms
* meagre (Commonwealth English)Adjective
(er)- A meager piece of cake in one bite.
citation, passage=...that begets many ugly and deformed phantasies in the braine, which being also hot and drie in the second extenuates and makes meager the body extraordinarily, ...}}
citation, passage=Nor none of thee thou pale and common drudge tween man and man: but thou, thou meager lead which rather threatnest then dost promise ought...}}
Synonyms
* See alsoDerived terms
* meagerly * meagernessAnagrams
* * ----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