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

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

The party also looks to be on the verge of unveiling some Wales-specific policies and pledges, of which there are precious few.

From BBC • Feb. 2, 2026

Long-term injuries to Alexander Isak, Giovanni Leoni and Conor Bradley have left Slot with precious few options both in defence and up front.

From Barron's • Jan. 25, 2026

“The writers were against the Klan, all right, but they had precious few inside facts about it.”

From "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" by Steven D. Levitt