‘not many’, ‘a few’ and other uncountable amounts

Consider the following sentences and see if you can decide on the amount of people that we are describing:

• There weren’t many people in London yesterday.
• There were many people in London yesterday.
• There were a few people in London yesterday.
• There were a number of people in London yesterday.
• There were loads of people in London yesterday.
• There weren’t any people in London yesterday.
• There were crowds of people in London yesterday.
• There were millions of people in London yesterday.

In these cases the thing we are describing (people) are uncountable, because London is a big city and the people count changes enormously depending on where we are. So the sentence ‘There were 324 people in London yesterday” doesn’t really make sense.

And as with all uncountable nouns (in this case people), the adjective used is a very subjective one (i.e. it’s meaning will vary from one person to the next, or depending on what you are describing). So when it comes to ‘people in London’, using words like ‘many’ might imply that there were more people than usual. London is a very busy city usually, so using the words ‘a few’, or ‘not many’ might suggest there were fewer people than usual.

Using ‘crowds’, and ‘millions’ and ‘loads’ suggest that the city was probably busier than expected. The use of ‘a number of people’ doesn’t really tell us anything, unless we say ‘a fair number of people’, which probably implies it was busy, but not especially so. If we say the ‘streets were packed’ then it probably was more busy than normal, or from what we had expected.

Finally the use ‘There weren’t any people’ is very unlikely to be true in London. You are more likely to say ‘The streets were empty’, to mean that there were far fewer people out and about than normal.