Paucity refers to "littleness" in numbers (as in "a paucity of facts") or quantity ("a paucity of common sense"). The word comes from paucus, Latin for "little."
If you had one of those Yugoslav names with a paucity of vowels, you might sprinkle in a few …—Calvin Trillin, Time, 22 May 2000For my part, I find increasingly that I miss the simplicity, the almost willful paucity, of the English way of doing things.—Bill Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999This relative paucity of freeloaders and deadbeats means that rookie Americans, as a group, more than pay their way.—Jaclyn Fierman, Fortune, 9 Aug. 1993
a paucity of useful answers to the problem of traffic congestion at rush hour
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What connects those three results is the notion that at the season's halfway mark, there appears to be a paucity of pigskin dominance across a league where teams toggle between looking superb and sliding, varying on the week.—Andrew Greif, NBC news, 3 Nov. 2025 But the indictments are startling for their paucity compared with the charges described in Patel’s boasts.—Sally Jenkins, The Atlantic, 26 Oct. 2025 Rather, her photos, documents and collages point to the extreme paucity of surviving evidence and the utter impossibility of a cohesive, factual narrative.—Literary Hub, 21 Oct. 2025 The sheer paucity of Russian resources, after three and a half years of war, may lead to a similarly ineffective response to any use of Tomahawks.—Nick Paton Walsh, CNN Money, 30 Sep. 2025 See All Example Sentences for paucity
Word History
Etymology
Middle English paucite, from Latin paucitat-, paucitas, from paucus little — more at few
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