Few and far between

Definition

few / fju: / indef det, adj ( -er, -est ) (used with pl countable ns and a pl v) အနည္းငယ္။ နည္းေသာ။ Few people live to be 100. ❍ a man / woman of few words (ie one who speaks very little) ❍ There are fewer cars parked outside than yesterday. ❍ The police have very few clues to the murderer's identity. ❍ The few houses we have seen are in terrible condition. ❍ There were too few people at the meeting. ❍ The last few years have been very difficult. ❍ I visit my parents every few days / weeks / months (ie once in a few days, etc). ❍ Accidents at work are few. (Compare: There are few accidents at work. ) ❍ LESS, MUCH indef det, indef pron indef pron (မတိက်ေသာ အၫႊန္းနာမ္စား)။ အနည္းငယ္သာ။ (က) အနည္းငယ္သာ။ Of the 150 passengers, few escaped injury. ❍ Few can deny the impact of his leadership. ❍ Hundreds of new songs are recorded each week but few (of them) get into the charts. (ခ) အနည္းငယ္သာ။ The few who came to the concert really enjoyed it. ❍ We saw few of the sights as we were only there for two hours. ❍ As few as five people arrived on time. a few indef det (used with pl countable ns and a pl v ) အနည္းငယ္။ အခ်ဳိ႕။ a few letters ❍ a few days ago ❍ He asked us a few questions. ❍ We're having a few people for lunch. ❍ Only a few (ie Not many) students were awarded distinctions. ❍ MUCH indef det, indef pron a few indef pron (မတိက်ေသာ အၫႊန္းနာမ္စား)။ အခ်ဳိ႕။ (က) အခ်ဳိ႕။ She's written many books but I've only read a few (of them). (ခ) အခ်ဳိ႕။ A few of the seats were empty. ❍ I recognized a few of the other guests. adv နည္းနည္း။ a few too many mistakes ❍ Perhaps you could give me a few more details of the scheme. ❏ the few n [pl v ] လူနည္းစု။ အနည္းစု။ Real power belongs to the few. Compare THE MANY ❏ few and far between [ IDM ] အခါက်ဲ၍ အလာနည္းေသာ။ Buses in this area are few and far between. ❍ The sunny intervals we were promised have been few and far between. ❏ fewer indefpron (မတိက်ေသာအၫႊန္းနာမ္စား)။ Fewer than 50 students applied for the course ❍ She had no fewer than 13 children. ❏ a good few; quite a few; ( fml ) not a few [ IDM ] အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ား။ အတန္မ်ားမ်ား။ There were a good few copies sold on the first day. ❍ Quite a few of my friends are vegetarian. ❏ have a few [ IDM ] (usu in the present perfect) အရက္ကိုမူးလုနီးပါးေသာက္သည္။ မူးေအာင္ေသာက္ သည္။ I've had a few (ie a few glasses of beer, wine, etc) already, actually. ❍ She looks as if she's had a few.

Examples

1. [a few] : Outside there are only a few streetlights.
2. I spoke with a few colleagues about it.
3. There were a few who failed the test.
4. [few of] : A few of the plates were chipped.
5. [a few more] : I’m not sure how many I’ll need
6. so give me a few more.
7. [the first/last few] : I’ve only read the first few pages of the book.
8. [the past/next few] : During the past few months
9. police have interviewed over 200 people.
10. Everything is expected to change in the next few years.
11. [every few] : Clean the cage every few days.
12. Few managers attend the meetings.
13. Bush won the election by fewer than 3000 votes.
14. The pictures were taken at one of his few public appearances.
15. She approached several people
16. but few were interested.
17. The car with the fewest mechanical problems
18. [few of] : Few of the retail firms are offering a home delivery service.
19. [the few] : Poe and his colleagues are among the few to have tackled this question.
20. The few times he did show up
21. he was late.
22. [so few] : Why were there so few women in Parliament?
23. [too few] : Too much money chasing too few goods causes inflation.
24. [very few] : We get very few complaints of racial discrimination.
25. [be few] : Their victories were few.