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?
Word Usage – How Many Items Are Actually ‘a Few Items’?
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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?
Best Answer
Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, in The Reader Over Your Shoulder, offer this “scale of approximate counting”:
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.