precious few

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.

Example Sentences

Tess moves with a troop of kooky outer-borough women, leaving the musical with precious few intimate moments of thoughtful stillness.

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“Our life was obscure, perhaps not so interesting to some, but for us it was a whole life,” Smith explains, while telling stories of playing music together for hours, of making a home with precious few possessions, of accommodating the other person’s projects and affinities: For Fred, it was restoring an old boat that would never be made seaworthy; for Patti, it was the creation of a room in their house where she could write and travel inside her mind.

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The Terrible Towels were everywhere, but there were precious few opportunities to swirl them.

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With costs rising, plus the aforementioned endowment tax, precious few universities could afford that.

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And, of course failed players, financial waste and precious few trophies.

Read more on BBC