An insufficient quantity or number

Usage examples of paucity.

Beale could introduce the little girl only, alas, by revealing to her so attractive, so enthralling a name: the side-shows, each time, were sixpence apiece, and the fond allegiance enjoyed by the elder of our pair had been established from the earliest time in spite of a paucity of sixpences.

The discovery of these books, however much appreciated in view of the paucity of correlative material, occasioned further difficulties when it was found that a method of reckoning time was used in them that had been quite unknown in the old Mayan kingdom.

Remembering the paucity of evidence in the papers Sark had sent to Cranston, Margo realized that Sark must have disposed of anything and everything important.

The paucity of bleeding noted from the edges is probably secondary to spasms of the frontalis muscles, compressing ripped blood vessels.

In reconsidering our relation to attention, given the paucity of our own scientific resources, it is only reasonable to look beyond our own contemporary society to the wisdom of earlier eras of our own culture and to other cultures that have not been encumbered by the dominant ideology that so constrains modern scientific and medical research.

The paucity of learning shown in the answers of the nuns being sufficient to convince any fairminded person that the whole affair was a ridiculous comedy, the bailiff felt encouraged to persevere until he had unravelled the whole plot.

Not only did he find therein a reassuring paucity of the turgid testosteronic prose which so often dominated conversation in the company lunchroom, it was usually cooler in the tunnels.

None of the chitlin grammar, none of the scatological paucity of language ever appeared in Starr's written reports of wet-work assignments.

The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested than by the paucity of tufts of grass, lichens, or confervae on their outermost ledges.

I suppose this speaks both to the paucity of our imaginations and, somewhat more obliquely, to the anti-intellectualism that has held sway in our country for quite some time.

The former absence of food production in these lands was due entirely to their local paucity of domesticable wild animals and plants, and to geographic and ecological barriers that prevented the crops and the few domestic animal species of other parts of the Americas from arriving.

Another, more excusable error (given the paucity of specimens at the time) was that dinosaurs constitute not one but two orders of reptiles: the bird-hipped ornithischians and the lizard-hipped saurischians.

So far he had personally experienced nothing worse than unexplained price increases at particular restaurants and sudden paucities of accommodations at motels.

Whatever creatures had lived here before had had different requirements for there were significant basic elements lacking in the soil: chitin, selenium, most of the rare earths, and a paucity of calcium, though quantities of that would have been available from sea creatures.

I wanted to handle this myself, friendly skies, but the more I thought about it the more impressed I became with the adversary powers I had encountered and the paucity of my knowledge concerning S.