An Australian here.

"A couple" is exactly 2, excepting very specific downward exaggeration ("I'll only have a couple of beers.")

"Several" is always more than 2 but always a small number - say 3, 4, or 5.

"A few" is always more than 2 and probably more than several.

"Many" would normally exceed several, probably by quite a bit.

And of course "one" is always 1, excepting downwards exaggeration similar to a couple.

Imagine his excitement: after 5 years of marriage, she suddenly gave him the rhetorical ammunition he needed to bring a mistress into the relationship. After all, they were a couple, and since when does that mean only two?

Until age 17 I thought of "a couple" as being an imprecise amount more than "one" but less than "a few". So around 2-3. Though when referring to people I always thought of it as =2.

It wasn't until 17 that someone (my girlfriend at the time) pointed out that by definition it should always be 2.

I'm not sure why I thought there was some fuzz in there. I also don't know why nobody had corrected me until then. I can only speculate that I and the people around me usually said "two" when we wanted two of something. The rest of the time I suppose I had a 50/50 shot at the right answer.

I find that pretty bizarre. I do sometimes refer to more than two things as "a couple of X" (which I probably immediately internally cringe over after saying it), but if I were to ask someone to buy a couple of something, I would never expect more than two to be bought.

Ultimately we probably should just avoid using these words when asking someone to do something that will result in some sort of concrete number of things or events. Better to just convey a specific number and avoid confusion.

I attest the following usages:

* "a couple of things" _ is a general statement meaning, sundry articles

* "a couple of specific things" _ sundry but specific articles which the knight errant must not fail to fetch, e.g. dinner likely depends on it

* "a couple of apples" _ means two apples

I remember being distinctly befuddled when I was younger watching an episode of Fawlty Towers when the obnoxious “American” orders “a couple of filet mignons”.

As an American myself, it felt like one should know how precisely how many filet mignons one wanted when ordering in a restaurant, rather than leaving it up to interpretation.

Didn’t realize then that “couple” in British English was almost certain to mean exactly two. I wonder if Americans also used it in that sense back in the 1970s when that episode was filmed, or if that is actually a bit of a shibboleth goof — the “American” actor was of course British, like everyone on the show except John Cleese’s real-life wife Connie Booth.

(Now that I think of it, as Booth was a co-writer, she probably would have caught this mistake if it was in fact a difference in American vs. British English. I imagine instead the American meaning has drifted toward less specificity over time.)

Surprising people think this then always say “you are a cute couple” or “you make a good married couple.”

Brit here. ‘Couple’ always means two, to me.

Years ago I read ‘The Difference Engine’, a steampunk novel written by an American set in Victorian England. I thought the dialogue etc seemed quite realistically English until one of the protagonists returns from a bar with ‘a pair of pints’. No Brit would ever use ‘pair’ like this although ‘couple’ would work, sort of.

I'm an ESL speaker, and throughout my whole life I've always considered "a couple" to be equivalent to "a few". Then, I played Papers, Please and the author has always only used the term to mean exactly two. I still associate this meaning with that particular game.

My mom's interpretation (midwest and eastcoast US, 80s) is largely related to snacks before dinner. "Can I have a few cookies?" "You can have a couple". This meant two. You could sometimes get away with three, but it would result in mild disappointment from my mom, because if she meant three she would have said "you can have a few". In no case did couple mean four. "Can we have some cookies?" "Yes, you can have some cookies" meant four total cookies, split between the siblings, presumably fairly (but she let us battle out that agreement, with everyone getting at least one). This wasn't based solely on how many you had, but how many she expected the cookie jar to be short the next time she looked at it, so you couldn't game it by asking for a few multiple times. "Some" was pretty rare, probably more likely in the early afternoon vs getting closer to dinner time. "Several" was more than four, and was very rare. There was some wiggle room, at least in what you could get away with even if the meaning was absolute, with the cost being a disappointing look and admonishment of "you'll ruin your dinner". Couple is two. Few was three. Some was four. If she said "some" and you took three, you were cheating yourself.

Watching a Mad Men clip last night, Draper, Sterling and a client are at a restaurant and Roger handwavingly dismisses the waiter saying "bring us a couple of iceberg wedges" for, presumably, the three of them, and I thought "Who exactly did he order for?"

As an American my family had very strict notions of this growing up.

Couple = 2, that's it. Few = 3 75.000001% of the time. Otherwise it's 4.

Canada is a big place, but for what it’s worth, in my 36 years of being Canadian, a “couple” has always meant “two, but if I get three or four that’s fine.”

I'm Canadian and my wife is American, and we have absolutely the same disagreement. To me, a couple is exactly two, and to her, it's a synonym for "a few". We compromise by being explicit whenever that word is used.

As an aussie, it can mean both for me.

eg. i just need to you to grab a couple of things from supermarket for me.

The number of items is small, not not always two.

Right - an obvious example being "married couple"

Same in South Africa; I was surprised to hear "a couple" can mean more than two.

Contrary anecdata:

US citizen, parents from two different dialectal regions in the US.

I was corrected as a child for using "couple" to mean an indeterminate small number and instructed that it means precisely two.

Well it’s fairly self evident - “the happy couple” - we’re not talking about three or four people, we always mean a pair, comprising two people

> she asked “since when does a couple mean two?”

Sounds like she’s into polygamy? ;)

in german there is a distinction: "a couple" as in "two people" is "ein Paar", whereas "a couple of things" does not get capitalized: "ein paar Dinge"

i'm from the western united states and have always understood "a couple of ___" to be more than 2.

I am on the wife's side here.

I was in the US and someone corrected me when I said I had a couple of something and they said "Actually, you've got three" or something "That's what I said" "You said a couple" "..."

It had never occurred to me that people mistakenly thought couple meant exactly 2 - how weird.