a little vs awhile

a little

adv

  • To a small extent or degree. 

  • A lot. 

  • Slightly. 

  • Very. 

  • A lot of. 

det

  • A small amount of. 

awhile

adv

  • For some time; for a short time. 

  • In the meantime; during an implicit ongoing process. 

How often have the words a little and awhile occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )