Sparse

How to spell sparse

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sparse

What does sparse mean?

1. adjectiveThinly scattered or present only in small amounts.

Sparse in a sentence

• The report was based on sparse and unreliable data.

• Vegetation is sparse in the high desert plateau.

Where does sparse come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin sparsus, the past participle of spargere, a verb that literally meant 'to scatter' or 'to strew about'. The original image was of seeds or water flung loosely across a surface, so that what remained was thinly and unevenly spread rather than densely packed. English adopted the word in the seventeenth century, keeping the sense of something scattered thinly, and from there it came to describe anything present only in small or scattered amounts: thin hair, light population, scanty data. The same spargere root still echoes in 'disperse' and 'aspersion', both of which carry the idea of throwing or scattering. The spelling trap is the unstressed ending, which sounds like 'sparce' to many writers, but it is firmly spelled -se to match the Latin sparsus.

How the word is built

• spars- (from Latin sparsus: scattered)
• -e