Piecemeal Meaning
/ˈpiːs.miːl/Definition, CEFR level C1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
adjMade or done in pieces or one stage at a time.
advPiece by piece; in small amounts, stages, or degrees.
Sentence Examples
The information is leaking piecemeal to the press.
He said that the piecemeal solution of the government will not work.
CEFR Practice Quiz
We renovated the old house ____, completing one room at a time.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The reforms were introduced in a ____ fashion over several years rather than all at once.
Word Origin & History
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.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Such assistance, I am convinced, must not be on a piecemeal basis, as various crises develop."
— 1947, George Marshall, The Marshall Plan Speech:
"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."
— 2003, Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History, Penguin, →ISBN, page 16:
"“This takes us away from the piecemeal, bit by bit approach,” said Cathleen Curran Myers, the Pennsylvania representative on the basin commission."
— 2007 October 2, Anthony Depalma, “City Agrees to Help Regulate Delaware River by Releasing Water From Reservoirs”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 05 Jun 2015:
"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."
— 2012, James Lambert, “Beyond Hobson-Jobson: A new lexicography for Indian English”, in World Englishes, page 312:
"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."
— 1914, Saki, The Forbidden Buzzards:
Explore More C1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
We renovated the old house ____, completing one room at a time.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
The reforms were introduced in a ____ fashion over several years rather than all at once.