paucity

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English paucite,^[2][3][4] also pauceté,^[5] partly borrowed from Middle French paucité^[6][3] and partly directly borrowed from Latin paucitās (“smallness of number, fewness, scarcity”),^[6][4][5][7] from paucus (“few, little”)^[6][4][8] and the noun suffix -tās.^[6] The OED records the French word from the second half of the 13th century,^[6] while Etymonline dates it to the 14th.^[4] The Latin adjective comes from Proto-Indo-European *pau- (“few, little”),^[4][9][8] which also gave few and pauper,^[9][3] and it is the source of French peu, Italian poco and Spanish poco.^[9] Klein compares Ancient Greek παῦρος (paûros, “few, little”).^[3]

Earliest recorded meaning

Smallness of quantity and, of a nerve, thinness: Barnhart gives 1392, as pauceté,^[5] from a manuscript that the Middle English Dictionary dates by the same year.^[2] The OED's first quotation for this sense is in a translation of Guy de Chauliac's Grande Chirurgie, perhaps from before 1425.^[6][2]

Semantic evolution

The first English records of the sense of small quantity are medical: the OED notes that post-classical Latin paucitas had this meaning by 1363, in Chauliac himself, whereas classical Latin used it of number.^[6] The sense "smallness of number, fewness" follows in English about 1425, in the Book of Foundation of St Bartholomew's.^[6][4] Johnson (1755) put "fewness" first and "smallness of quantity" second, quoting Hooker on "paucity of schools" and Brown on "this paucity of blood".^[10] Modern dictionaries still give both,^[7][11] and the quantity sense now also covers a dearth or insufficiency of something.^[7][11]

Timeline

• 1392 – smallness of quantity, thinness, as pauceté.^[5][2]
• c. 1425 – smallness of number, fewness.^[6][4]

Meanings

Noun

1. A small number; fewness: a paucity of experienced tenors in the choir.^[7][11][6]
2. A small quantity of something; scarcity, dearth or insufficiency.^[7][11][6]

Related words

• few
• pauper
• poco
• pauci-

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d Kurath, Hans; Kuhn, Sherman M.; Lewis, Robert E., eds. (1952–2001), Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; online edition ed. Frances McSparran et al. (2000–2018)
3. ^ a b c d Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
4. ^ a b c d e f g Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
5. ^ a b c d Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c d e Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
8. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
9. ^ a b c Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
10. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
11. ^ a b c d Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins