Sparsely means thinly scattered or spread out, with lots of empty space in between. When something is distributed sparsely, you'll find only a little bit here and there rather than packed together.

A sparsely populated region might have just one house every few miles, with wide stretches of empty land between neighbors. In the American West, many states are sparsely populated compared to cities on the East Coast, where houses and buildings crowd close together. A sparsely furnished room contains only a few pieces of furniture, with bare walls and open floor space. A lawn might be sparsely covered with grass, showing patches of dirt where the grass hasn't filled in yet.

Think of sprinkling a handful of seeds across a garden: if you toss them sparsely, each seed lands far from the others. If you toss them densely, they land closer together.

You might read that trees grow sparsely on a mountainside above a certain elevation, or that stars appear sparsely in a light-polluted city sky. The opposite would be densely or thickly: a densely populated city, a thickly furnished room, or a sky densely packed with stars on a clear night far from city lights.