Plenty vs Little - What's the difference?
plenty | little |
A more than adequate amount.
* 1798 , (Thomas Malthus), (An Essay on the Principle of Population):
More than sufficiently.
(label) , very.
* 26 June 2014 , A.A Dowd, AV Club Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler spoof rom-com clichés in They Came Together [http://www.avclub.com/review/paul-rudd-and-amy-poehler-spoof-rom-com-cliches-th-206220]
(label) much, enough
(label) many
(label) plentiful
* 1597 , Shakespeare, Henry IV , Part I, Act I, Scene IV:
* 1836 , The American Gardener's Magazine and Register , volume 2, page 279:
Small in size.
Insignificant, trivial.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-21, author=
, volume=189, issue=2, page=30, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly)
, title= Very young.
(of a sibling) Younger.
* 1871 October 18, The One-eyed Philosopher [pseudonym], "Street Corners", in Judy: or the London serio-comic journal , volume 9, page 255 [http://books.google.com/books?id=_B4oAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA255]:
* 2004 , Barry Miles, Zappa: A Biography , 2005 edition, ISBN 080214215X, page 5:
Small in amount or number, having few members.
Short in duration; brief.
Small in extent of views or sympathies; narrow; shallow; contracted; mean; illiberal; ungenerous.
* Tennyson
Not much.
:
*
*:Little disappointed, then, she turned attention to "Chat of the Social World," gossip which exercised potent fascination upon the girl's intelligence. She devoured with more avidity than she had her food those pretentiously phrased chronicles of the snobocracy […] distilling therefrom an acid envy that robbed her napoleon of all its savour.
Not at all.
:
*
*:But then I had the [massive] flintlock by me for protection. ¶, and a 'bead' could be drawn upon Molly, the dairymaid, kissing the fogger behind the hedge, little dreaming that the deadly tube was levelled at them.
*{{quote-news, year=2012, date=May 13, author=Alistair Magowan, work=BBC Sport
, title= Not much, only a little: only a small amount (of).
As adverbs the difference between plenty and little
is that plenty is more than sufficiently while little is not much.As determiners the difference between plenty and little
is that plenty is much, enough while little is not much, only a little: only a small amount (of).As adjectives the difference between plenty and little
is that plenty is plentiful while little is small in size.As proper nouns the difference between plenty and little
is that plenty is a village in Saskatchewan, Canada while Little is {{surname}.As a noun plenty
is a more than adequate amount.As a pronoun plenty
is more than enough.plenty
English
Noun
- We are lucky to live in a land of peace and plenty .
- During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great that population is at a stand. In the mean time the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land, to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage
Usage notes
While some dictionaries analyse this word as a noun, others analyse it as a pronoun,Macmillan]or as both a noun and a pronoun.[http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/plenty oxforddictionaries.comHarrap's essential English Dictionary'' (1996)''Heinemann English Dictionary (2001)
Derived terms
* horn of plenty * land of plenty * plenteous * plentifulSynonyms
* abundance * profusionUsage notes
See the notes about the noun.Adverb
(-)- This office is plenty big enough for our needs.
- She was plenty mad at him.
- Seeing clichés mimicked this skillfully is plenty hilarious.
Determiner
(en determiner)- There'll be plenty time later for that
- Get a manicure. Plenty men do it.
Adjective
(en adjective)- if reasons were as plenty as blackberries
- Radishes are very plenty . Of cabbages a few heads of this year's crop have come to hand this week, and sold readily at quotations; [...]
Anagrams
*little
English
(wikipedia little)Adjective
Chico Harlan
Japan pockets the subsidy …, passage=Across Japan, technology companies and private investors are racing to install devices that until recently they had little interest in: solar panels. Massive solar parks are popping up as part of a rapid build-up that one developer likened to an "explosion."}}
- If you want to find Little' France, take any turning on the north side of Leicester square, and wander in a zigzag fashion Oxford Streetwards. The ' Little is rather smokier and more squalid than the Great France upon the other side of the Manche.
- In the forties, hurdy-gurdy men could still be heard in all those East Coast cities with strong Italian neighbourhoods: New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston. A visit to Baltimore's Little Italy at that time was like a trip to Italy itself.
- a little sleep
- The long-necked geese of the world that are ever hissing dispraise, / Because their natures are little .
Usage notes
Some authorities regard both littler' and '''littlest''' as non-standard. The OED says of the word little: "''the adjective has no recognized mode of comparison. The difficulty is commonly evaded by resort to a synonym (as smaller, smallest); some writers have ventured to employ the unrecognized forms littler, littlest, which are otherwise confined to dialect or imitations of childish or illiterate speech.''" The forms '''lesser''' and ' least are encountered in animal names such as lesser flamingo and least weasel.Antonyms
* (small) large, big * (young) big * (younger) bigAdverb
Sunderland 0-1 Man Utd, passage=But as United saw the game out, little did they know that, having looked likely to win their 13th Premier League title, it was City who turned the table to snatch glory from their arch-rivals' grasp.}}
Antonyms
* muchDeterminer
- There is little water left.
- We had very little to do.