Learn English – What does it mean by “a cheery lot”

meaningphrase-meaningword-meaning

Chuckling about Malfoy, they waited, Norbert thrashing about in his crate. About ten minutes later, four broomsticks came swooping down out of the darkness. Charlie's friends were a cheery lot. They showed Harry and Hermione the harness they'd rigged up, so they could suspend Norbert between them.

–Harry potter and the sorcerer's stone (J.K Rowling)

'Cheery' means happy and cheerful, but what does it mean by 'they were a cheery lot'? Is it saying

(A) Charlie's friends were very (= a lot) cheery?

(B) Charlie's friends were a lot of people, and they were all cheery?

For me neither of these seems right because I think 'a' and 'lot' cannot be written separately since 'a lot' as a whole means 'very or very much'. And also it looks weird to put an adjective 'cheery' between 'a' and 'lot'.

Best Answer

Actually, yes, they can be written "separately". A is the usual indefinite article, whereas lot is a noun that is synonymous with group or bunch. Here's an entry I found from the Oxford Dictionaries Online:

lot
1 informal treated as singular or plural A particular group or set of people or things. ‘it's just one lot of rich people stealing from another’
‘he will need a second lot of tills to handle the second currency’
1.1 British with adjective A group of a specified kind (used in a derogatory or dismissive way)
‘an inefficient lot, our Council’

I doubt it's being used in a "derogatory" way in the story, as the dictionary suggests. It simply means that Charlie's friends were a cheery group. I don't think it suggests that there were many (= a lot) of friends, just enough to constitute a "group".

On a side note, I feel like you're more likely to see a different noun, like bunch (cheery bunch), in AmE. It's understandable in any case.

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