[ul]
[li]a couple - almost exclusively two (the exception is when I am being evasive - “I’ll get back to you within a couple of days” - in these cases, ‘couple’ might mean ‘few’)[/li]
[li]a few - three or more, but probably never reaching double digits and seldom more than five or six.[/li]
[li]a handful[/li]- for small objects, literally (say, beans) - up to as many as could reasonably fit in my hand (or the hand of an average person, or the hand of the person I am instructing (I mention this because the person may be a child).
for larger objects, figuratively (say, people) - no more than five
[li]several - three or more, upper range indeterminate, similar to a few[/li]
[/ul]**
[/QUOTE]
few: 3 to 5, usually. Unless I’m talking percentages, then all bets are off.
handful: 4 to 7, usually. When I do refer to this, which is rarely, I use it to refer to non-corporeal items, only a “handful” of which share a certain characteristic (as in, “only a handful of companies specialize in making 1920’s style “Death Rays””.)
a handful - it’s meaning depends on the context, but would almost always be in the range of “a few”. In the absence of context, I would say it means “roughly five”.
several - more than one, possibly many, but usually just “a few”.
Except for “a couple”, these all have a value relative to the meaning of “many” in my mind. If I had a million items in front of me and I separated out one hundred of them, I would feel as correct in saying “I separated a few” or “I separated several” as I would when talking about separating five items from fifty.