piecemeal
Part of speech: adj
adv
verb
noun
Morphological type: derivation
Etymology: From Middle English pecemele, from pece (“piece”) + mele (from Old English mǣlum (“at a time”), dative plural form of mǣl (“time, measure”), taking the place of Old English styċċemǣlum (“in pieces, bit by bit, piecemeal; to pieces, to bits; here and there, in different places; little by little, by degrees, gradually”); equivalent to piece + -meal.
Base: piece
Affixes: -meal
Inflected forms:
form: piecemeals
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: piecemealing
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: piecemealed
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: piecemealed
pos: verb
tags: past
form: piecemeals
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: Made or done in pieces or one stage at a time.
pos: adj
tags: idiomatic
not-comparable
examples: Near-synonyms: piecewise, stepwise; see also Thesaurus:gradual
a piecemeal approach
Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis, as various crises develop.
But the copious and intertwined associative links warrant our accepting the former alternative: cyclamen—favourite flower—favourite food— artichokes; pulling to pieces like an artichoke, leaf by leaf (a phrase constantly ringing in our ears in relation to the piecemeal dismemberment of the Chinese Empire)—herbarium—bookworms, whose favourite food is books.
We should not underestimate European laypeople. They were perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, particularly about death, a religious theme in which everyone had an investment and about which everyone was likely to have an opinion. There is no need to invoke the idea of systematic pagan survival to account for this: Europe’s mass Christianization had been a steady if piecemeal process from the sixth century through to the fourteenth.
“This takes us away from the piecemeal, bit by bit approach,” said Cathleen Curran Myers, the Pennsylvania representative on the basin commission.
The dictionaries themselves cover this additional lexis in what can best be described as a piecemeal fashion, with an obvious but unwarranted bias towards colonial era lexis.
gloss: Piece by piece; in small amounts, stages, or degrees.
pos: adv
tags: not-comparable
examples: It’s as bad as selling a man a horse with half a dozen latent vices and watching him discover them piecemeal in the course of the hunting season.
The Western Region route, by contrast, was built up piecemeal and was not shaped in its present form until 1910.
The Government is under fresh pressure not to sell off piecemeal the route of the abandoned northern extension to Manchester until extra rail capacity has been clearly identified.
gloss: Into pieces or parts.
pos: adv
tags: not-comparable
examples: Stoop villaine, ſtoop, ſtoope for ſo he bids,
That may commaund thee peecemeale to be torne,
Or ſcattered like the lofty Cedar trees.
Strooke with the voice of thundring Iupiter.
A few years ago also there was the case of Kate Webster, who at Richmond murdered her mistress, and, fiend-like, cut the body up piecemeal, and tried to dispose of it in various ways by small portions.
gloss: To divide or distribute piecemeal; dismember.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
gloss: A fragment; a scrap.
pos: noun
examples: Thus the world Is all to piecemeals cut
The fairest towns that ever the sun rose upon, are now no more: the names only are left, and those (for many of them are wrong spelt) are falling themselves by piecemeals to decay.
Synonyms: bit by bit
Derived words: piecemealing
Translations: