Few 'a few' in English Grammar

pronounced flower yacht boot

  1. indef det, adj [usu attrib] (-er, -est) (used with pl [C] ns and a pl v) not many:
    1. Few people live to be 100.
    2. There are fewer cars parked outside than yesterday.
    3. The police found very few clues to the murderer's identity.
    4. There are very few opportunities for promotion.
    5. The few houses we have seen are in terrible condition.
    6. There were too few people at the meeting.
    7. Accidents on site are few. (Cf There are few accidents on site.)
  2. (idiom) few and far between infrequent, with long period of waiting involved: The buses to our village are few and far between. The sunny intervals we were promised have been few and far between.
  3. few indef pronoun not many people, things, places, etc. (a) (referring back): Of the 150 passengers, few escaped injury. (saying) Many are called but few are chosen. Hundreds of new records are being produced each week but few (of them) get into the charts. (b) (referring forward): Few of us will still be alive in the year 2050. The few who came to the concert enjoyed it. We saw few of the sights as we were only there for two hours.
  4. The few n [pl v] the minority: a voice for the few.

Some useful hints on article usage in English

A Couple of words about few/a few from:

A Sudent's Grammar of the English Language by Sidney Greenbaum & Randolph Quirk, Longman, 1992, page 77&126.

postdeterminers are determiners that come after central determiners"; like
the, an, some any, and also this, these, that those, etc.
They (postdeterminers fall into two classes:
  • (a) ordinal, such as first, fourth, last, other;
  • (b) quantifiers , such as seven, ninety, many, few, plenty, a lot of:
  • the first two poems
  • my last two possessions
  • her other many accomplishments

Among the (b) items there are two important distinctions involving few and little. First, few occurs only with plural count nouns, little only with noncount nouns. Second, when preceded by a, each has a positive meaning; without a, each has a negative meaning. Thus:

  1. I play a few games (ie 'several').
  2. I play few games (ie 'hardly any').
  3. She ate a little bread (ie 'some').
  4. She ate little bread (ie 'hardly any),

Note: Comparative forms can be preceded by items of absolute meaning:

There were a few more of our supporters than I had expected.";
She played much less of Beethoven's music than we had hoped.