few

det

1. An indefinite, but usually small, number of.

   “There are a few cars (=some, but a relatively small number) in the street.”

   “Quite a few people (=a significant number) were pleasantly surprised.”

   “I think he's had a few drinks.”

   “The few cheapest hotels I could find are the farthest too.”

   “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.”

2. Not many; a small (in comparison with another number stated or implied) but somewhat indefinite number of.

   “Very few did she have not to go there, did she?”

   “I was expecting a big crowd at the party, but very few people (=almost none) turned up.”

   “Your men are valiant but their number few, And cannot terrifie his mightie hoſt, […]”

   “Already we're seeing fewer cache misses by avoiding creating cache entries for the idle task and expect to see even fewer with changes to the TLB reload code to uncache the page tables.”

   “However, the above passage could have been written more efficiently — if Strunkian concision, using the fewest words possible, is understood as the measure of verbal efficiency.”

3. Obscuring one to two oktas (eighths) of the sky.

   “Tonight: A few clouds. Increasing cloudiness overnight.”

   “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 phenomena aloft are present--that is, not when obscuring phenomena are surface-based, such as fog.”

4. (US?) Having a 10 percent chance of measurable precipitation (0.01 inch); used interchangeably with isolated.

pron

1. Few people, few things.

   “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

name

1. (British)The pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain.
2. A surname.