sparse

SPARSSadj

Meaning thinly scattered; few and far between

Memory hook SPARSE: lots of SPARE seats. On the night of the big storm, nearly every seat at Jonah’s concert is spare; just two fans sit far apart. The crowd is sparse.

The desert’s sparse bushes offered little shade.

In context The audience was sparse: only a dozen people sat scattered across a theater built for five hundred.

Similar scattered, thin, scanty, meager

Opposite dense, thick, abundant

From Latin sparsus, “scattered,” from spargere, “to scatter.”