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

There are precious few faces I want to see pop up again next season.

From BBC

After precious few nights out without our kids, we had willingly suspended our better judgment—only to be reminded, expensively, that there are better ways to signal how you feel.

From The Wall Street Journal

"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

But the cracks were showing in the goals his team were conceding and now, five months on, there are precious few new images to line the walls of Liverpool's training ground.

From BBC