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• n  the property of being scanty or scattered; lacking denseness

• The country's sparsity of population is the chief obstacle in its progress.
• Three months ago in Rome, Pope Pius XII dressed him down for his sparsity of morals and his abundance of pro-Axis sympathies.
• With sparsity of character, bleakness of setting, poverty of action and ellipses of language, he has been pursuing the doctrine that "less is more.

• sparseness
• spareness
• thinness

News & Articles

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• Columbus & the Pigeons
  Robert Dankoff To the Editors : Elizabeth Kolbert’s response to Jane D. Saxton’s query about the pre-Columbian presence of vast numbers of passenger pigeons surprised me in light of Charles C. Mann’s discussion of the subject in his book 1491 . Mann cites Thomas W. Neumann, who concluded from the sparsity of passenger pigeon bones at Indian burial sites that they were not as numerous before ...
  Feb. 27, 2014 - New York Review of Books

Quotes

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• Matt Dillon in San Francisco Chronicle
  He was in his early 20s when he first read Bukowski -- a friend gave him a book of the author's short stories -- and "I was hooked. I loved it," Dillon says. "The irreverence, the sparsity of his writing, his directness -- nothing too...
• Hugo Burnham in Boston Globe (registration)
  Burnham says he likes the "sparsity and dryness" of "Entertainment," but it "did not do justice to what we were -- barely contained ferocity."