sparse
Wyoming is sparsely populated.
The meetings were held in a dimly lit and sparsely furnished room.
The extreme western tip of Cuba is far more sparsely settled than the part of Cuba around Havana.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Scarce, inadequate and not enough
be at a premiumidiom
be thin on the groundidiom
chronic shortage
dearth
dearth of something
gold dust
insufficiently
lack
lacking
like gold dustidiom
long on something and short on somethingidiom
lousy
scarce
scarcity
scrubby
shortage
shortfall
shy
skinny
thin

Examples of sparsely

sparsely
Information can be sparsely or coarsely distributed across populations of neurons depending upon the stimulation conditions.
This requires natural enemies to eliminate sparsely distributed patches of prey, so that prey spatial distribution is very relevant to the success of biological control.
It's easy to find stories of the ascent of this mountain, the descent of that river, or the traverse of some sparsely populated region.
They are classified according to various structural characteristics, including population size, degree of urbanization and production sector, ranging from sparsely populated municipalities to large cities.
These forests are sparsely populated and there are few roads.
Consider first a sparsely populated subsistence society with limited access to markets.
Vegetative reproduction in a favourable environment would produce a relatively dense local population of a species that is sparsely distributed elsewhere.
The contrasting scenario is one of a sparsely populated area that has excellent market access.
Consequently, susceptible plants were scattered sparsely among resistant plants.
The axons are thin, sparsely branched and have bouton-like swellings.
Attempts to detect non-randomness by examination of cell counts alone, when those counts represent a meagre sample of sparsely distributed individuals, can only prove frustrating.
Next, if the database is sparsely populated, the user must adjust the query until a populated run is found.
Isolated individual fibers, sparsely arborized, were also observed, although less frequently.
Simple pores about the same size as the trilocular pores, sparsely but evenly distributed.
The village was sparsely populated at the time of the survey and settlement.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.