Tuesday, March 22, 2016

word usage - How many items are actually "a few items"?


When we use a few, how many items are usually indicated? My intuition tells me it's something between 3 and 9, but what is the most common range for a few?



Answer



Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in The Reader Over Your Shoulder, offer this “scale of approximate counting”:



one or two, two or three, a few, several, a dozen or so, a score or so, a dozen or two, a score or two, a few dozen, dozens, a hundred or so, a few score, scores, a hundred or two, a few hundred, hundreds, a thousand or so, etc.




So I’d think, abstractly, that a few might be three or four to six or seven. Fewer than several. But as Anderson Silva says, context is everything.


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