precious few

Idioms  

1. Also, precious little. Very few, very little, as in There are precious few leaves left on the trees, or We have precious little fuel left. In these idioms precious serves as an intensive, a colloquial usage dating from the first half of the 1800s.

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Example Sentences

The case for cuts simply isn’t there at the moment, and there are likely precious few Fed voters who would even consider such a step at this point.

From Barron's • May 23, 2026

Choking off that waterway would mean that vessels could no longer access the Suez Canal via the Red Sea, effectively rendering one of the precious few ways of bypassing the Strait of Hormuz largely useless.

From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 12, 2026

"While there are precious few universal paralogs that we know," says Goldman, "they can give us a lot of information about what life was like before the time of the last universal common ancestor."

From Science Daily • Feb. 10, 2026

But the cracks were showing in the goals his team were conceding and now, five months on, there are precious few new images to line the walls of Liverpool's training ground.

From BBC • Feb. 9, 2026

There were precious few opportunities for young black men in the segregated America of the 1920s, yet through music these two men became icons.

From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall