What does “a couple” mean to you, and what does “a few” mean to you?

What is the proper way to use the terms “a couple” or “a few”?

How should one use these words to avoid confusion? How do people use these words in practice.

It was striking to hear that “a couple” meant two (2) to someone. My reaction was, “how/why do you make a short word longer by adding an extra syllable to just say ‘two?’”

Solution 1:

A couple is usually two (a married couple), or sometimes 'about two' if you are being vague (a couple of dozen, a couple of inches). A few is more than a couple, but not as many as several.

Solution 2:

I think Few: 2-3, Couple 4-6, Several 7+. What are your thoughts?

Definitely not. Couple is certainly fewer than few.

Pair: Two which go together, a matching couple.

Couple: Often used with roughly the same definition as pair, with some specific idioms, such as the happy couple (newlyweds). Sometimes used just to mean two, any two, not necessarily a pair. Sometimes, informally, used to mean few.

Few: A smallish group. There were a few washers in the bottom of the screw drawer.

Very few: A small number, smaller than expected. More than two, though.

Few enough: A small group, probably but not necessarily smaller than expected. Still more than two. "So was it a big crowd?" "Nah, there were few enough of us."

Quite a few: Several, more than expected. There were quite a few people at the party. It was a fair[-sized] crowd.

Several: A large number, but not necessarily larger than expected.

I'd rarely use the word few on its own. It would almost always be very few or quite a few.

For what it's worth, I'm Irish, with English parents, and listen to more BBC Radio 4 than anything else.

Solution 3:

We discussed this in a linguistics course I took in college. I was astonished to learn that some people distinguish "several" and "a few". My professor was astonished that some people would think they were the same.

For some people, "a few" and "several" are synonymous, with neither one meaning more than the other, but for others, "several" is more than "a few". Both "a few" and "several" are more than "a couple", which means two or about two.

Solution 4:

I've never encountered anybody who thinks that "couple" doesn't even begin until 4! The word literally means 2, though there are many people (myself included) who accept a little ambiguity. If you say "I'll call you back in a couple days" and you call tomorrow, or in three days, I won't be angry.

Solution 5:

These words only add value to English because they are vague; if that were not the case, English would need only the cardinals to represent quantities.

A vague term, by definition, has no discrete boundary between itself and its coordinate term (its semantic neighbour). The gradated boundaries of vague terms make them uniquely efficient: Consider that a vague term conveys more information than a range of values conveys. Where a range represents a series of values, a vague term represents a set of continual (non-discrete) values; the greater the difference between the most prototypical value in the set and any other value in the set, the less prototypical that value will be. For example, a subject is conceived to be less 'bald', the less his scalp resembles Patrick Stewart's scalp.

Precisely representing a vague term requires many more words or much more notation than defining a range requires. So vague terms are semantically economical.

In short, I think it's best to conceive terms such as 'several', 'couple', and 'few' to be overlapping value-ranges with no discrete boundary between any two of them.