Difference between “little”, “few”, “a little” and “a few”

Many of the answers are good and rafil99's answer comes closest to what I think needs to be said. I'll borrow his model and flesh it out more.

Here's the short version:

Few → Not many

"All the contestants have a chance to win, but few of them ever do."

A few → Three or more

"I have a few books to give you. When can you pick them up?"

Little → Not much

"I understood little of what you said."

A little → A bit, a handful

"A little patience goes a long way!"

Here's a small chart showing how to use them:

I'll examine them in detail below, starting with "few" and "a few". Luckily, most of the same notes apply to "little" and "a little".

N.B. I simplified the citations of the examples below. Most are from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Few → not many

"Few" is probably the easiest of all four — none of its definitions is much different from the first entry in the OED:

few, adj. 1. Not many; amounting to a small number. → A man of few words.

It is also possible to use "few" with this partitive genitive of and then a noun (plural or collective):

→ Few of the members of the late cabinet had any reason to expect his favour.

You can also separate it from a noun:

→ The enemy ... entering the town by few at a time. (That is, few of the enemy.)

You can also modify it with an adverb:

→ Among the numbers of bodies that I examined ... very few ... had gall-stones.

You can also use it in the comparative and the superlative:

→ No fewer than twenty-eight views.

A few → three or more

The OED has several definitions of "a few". Here's the most relevant one:

few, adj. 2. Like the cardinal numerals, few may be used to form [...] a virtual collective noun a. a few: a small number of. → I pray you let me now and then have a few lines from you.

I think most English speakers would agree with Wiktionary that if you have at least two or three things, then you have "a few" things.

The OED adds a very helpful note:

Without prefixed word, few usually implies antithesis with ‘many’, while in a few [...] the antithesis is with ‘none at all’.

This means that we usually say "few people" to mean "Not many people", but we usually say "a few people" to mean "At least some people!"

You can also use "a few" on its own. Here it means "a few people":

→ A level which had ... been reached only by a few.

But you can't say "a fewer" or "a fewest" — at least not in modern English.

Little (1) → not much

Luckily, "little" is very similar to "few".

We can make a helpful observation: The difference between "few" and "little" is the same as the difference between "many" and "much".

That means that we can use "few" before a plural or collective noun, but "little" before a singular or mass noun.

Here's the most relevant OED definition:

little, adj., pron., and n., and adv. II. Chiefly attrib. (as determiner) with mass or collective nouns. 11. With negative emphasis: not much; only a slight amount or degree of; hardly any. → He had little money, little patronage — no military establishment.

Like "few", we can also use "little" apart from a noun:

I've read a lot of science fiction, and enjoyed little. (That is, "I haven't enjoyed much of what I've read.")

You can also modify it with an adverb:

→ Bouncing angrily over with too little regard to his condition.

But you can't say the comparative "littler" or the superlative "littlest", not in this meaning.

One more note on "little" is that it's quite literary. Usually we say "not much". If we do use "little", we usually add "very" to make "very little".

A little → a bit of, a handful of

Once again, we're in luck: "a little" changes "little" exactly the same way that "a few" changes "few".

Here's the relevant definition from the OED:

little, adj., pron., and n., and adv. 12. With more positive emphasis: a small quantity of; some, though not much. b. a little. → Mitzi had saved a little money from the time when she had been a successful athlete.

Note that phrase "positive emphasis". That is, "a little" is just like "a few": it implies, "At least some!"

Most of the other notes I could make are the same ones I made for "a few".

Appendix: "little" → "small"

"Small" is certainly another meaning of "little". Keep in mind that this is an adjective, not a quantifier or pronoun.

Hopefully it's not too hard to keep these meanings separate.

However, it does mean that some sentences that look very similar have very different meanings. For example, jfhc gives this example:

Little dogs make good friends with cats.

This means that small dogs make good friends with cats.

On the other hand:

Little literary criticism is worth reading.

This means that not much literary criticism is worth reading.