Apart from Douchebaggery, there’s another thing that is hard to miss on Facebook: Poor Grammar. Visit any Facebook Page and you will cringe at the degree of syntax errors people commit pretty innocently. One of those most frequently committed errors is the confusion between “Few” and “A Few.”

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The Tone Shift

Don’t Say “Few” When You Mean “Some”

I have come across a lot of people who use “few” when they mean to say “some.” Here’s one such example: “Few people will never change their behavior.” In the above example, apparently, the person wants to say, “Some people will never change their behavior.”

Technically, the word “Few” suggests a small number of people or things. When we use the word “few,” we want to indicate that the number is smaller than what we expect or what is normally found in a particular situation. For example, if you see only 5 to 10 students present in a classroom session for which 50 students have enrolled, you can say there are “few” students in this session.

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The Real Question

How Much Is “A Few,” Really?

There’s no fixed number behind “a few” — and that’s deliberate, not a gap in the rule. “Few” and “a few” describe a quantity relative to what’s normal or expected in that specific situation, not a count on a scale.

Three people can be “a few” at a dinner party and “hardly any” at a wedding. The number bends to the context; the word doesn’t carry one on its own.

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The Ladder

Couple, Few, Several, Some — Where Each One Sits

These words all describe small-to-moderate quantities, but they sit at different points on the same ladder — each implying a bit more than the last, without ever committing to an exact count.

WORD	TYPICAL FEEL	EXAMPLE
A couple	Two, or very close to it	“I have a couple of ideas.”
few	A small number, more than a couple	“A few colleagues stayed late.”
Several	More than a few, still a limited set	Several clients raised the same issue.”
Some	An unspecified, often larger portion	“Some of the team disagreed.”

None of these words has a hard boundary — “several” and “a few” overlap in a lot of real sentences. What separates them is emphasis: “several” tends to signal “more than you might expect,” the same way “quite a few” does later in this article.

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The Agreement Trap

A Few = Not a Large Number

Compare the two sentences given below:

Here’s another comparative example originally found on Stack Exchange.

“I have a few objections to the vendor’s proposed approach.”

This implies that I am not on board with the vendor’s proposal. I have some objections, but not so many as to say “I have several objections…”. Nevertheless, I have objections that need to be addressed.

“I have few objections to the vendor’s proposed approach.”

This is a more positive statement that implies I am more or less on board with the proposal. It is not a whole-hearted endorsement, but I barely have any objections at all.

“There Are a Few” — Not “There Is a Few”

“Few” always takes a plural verb, because it’s describing countable things, even when the sentence starts with “there.”

Few” vs. “A Little” — Don’t Mix Them Up

“Few” only works with countable nouns — things you can count one by one (people, reasons, chances). For uncountable nouns (water, money, time), use “little” instead.

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The Idiom

Quite a Few: Definition

The idiom “Quite a few” confuses many English learners from around the world because of the irony it holds. It is important to understand there are many idioms in English that originated from conventions rather than rules. This essentially means you cannot change their structure.

What “Quite a few” really means

Quite a few means a fairly large number of something. It is usually used in a relative sense, meaning more than what is expected in a usual scenario. To keep it simple, though, it is synonymous with a large amount/number, a huge amount/number, and a significant amount/number of something.

Here are some examples of “Quite a few”

Quite a few people:

e.g. Quite a few people got the wrong impression.

Quite a few times:

e.g. I’ve seen this movie quite a few times and I know every dialogue by heart.

Quite a few years / Quite a few years ago:

e.g. Quite a few years have passed since he got married.

Quite a few of them:

e.g. Quite a few of them were corrupt and I couldn’t work with them for a long time.

Quite a bit:

e.g. There’s quite a bit of snow on the ground.

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The Trap

“A Few” vs. “Quite a Few”

There is a very common expression “quite a few”, which is a trap for foreign learners because it looks like it could mean “rather few or very few”, but it does not.

“Quite a few” expresses that the speaker was impressed or astonished by the number, as they would have expected less. Or the speaker wants to emphasize the fact that it was “more than you would think”.

As stated in the example above, “Quite a few” is used only when a specific number (of people or things) are not expected in a given situation. However, it has become quite common for people to use it to mean “many” or “a large number of.” So, saying “I have quite a few friends” is the same as saying “I have a lot of friends.”