hardly a

1. 1.

   very few

   “hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous date and year”

   Similarfew

Questions about hardly a

What does hardly a mean?

hardly a means "very few".

Is hardly a a common word?

hardly a is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.