Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmg102 | Hacker News Reader

This is not correct. "Quite few" is not correct English.

EDIT: on reading some of the linked sources I realise I was wrong about this.

Hi! English speaker here. It's not common, but it is perfectly acceptable. Here is some data to back this up: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=quite+few%2C+q...

Thanks!

> "Quite few" is not correct English.

I take it you don't speak English yourself? You can apply "quite" to any adjective, including "few".

While one could, it's not an idiom I (native speaker) have ever heard. I've heard "very few", but never "quite few", and I can see why hearing the latter might cause the listener/reader to mistakenly auto-correct it as "quite _a_ few".

I am a native English speaker and yes quite few is a thing that I have heard and said.

But we don't only speak in idioms. "Quite" and "few" are some the least ambiguous words you can come across in English, "quite few" should be clear so long as you don't add words and substitute in your own meaning as the reader.

I think the idiom "quite a few" is arguably worse to use in a diverse audience since it means the opposite of "a few" and is one of the only times "quite a" is used to negate the meaning of what follows.

Using 'quite few' to mean the opposite of 'quite a few' as a non-native speaker is a terrible idea. It doesn't matter how correct it is, a large portion of native speakers are going to assume you mean 'quite a few' and have misheard or mispronounced it.

It's not like either phrase is wanting for totally unambiguous synonyms.

Perhaps so. But it certainly sounds distinctly odd to me. Fairly confident I have never used or heard the construction myself. (Native speaker, 43, southern UK.)

Non-idiomatic is not the same as incorrect. There’s no semantic or syntactic issue with the phrase.

there are quite few ducks where I live

It works, but it's awkward. Same with "quite many" which doesn't get as much use

Reply on news.ycombinator.com